


all the same organs of feeling

by JulisCaesar



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Animal Abuse, Animal Attack, Animal Death, Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical spiders, Eating Disorders, Euthanasia, Gen, Harm to Animals, Kidnapping, Mild Gore, Mutilation, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Racism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24258169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulisCaesar/pseuds/JulisCaesar
Summary: Fear is not an emotion exclusive to humans. This folder contains statements regarding fear of, or by, non-human animals.
Comments: 68
Kudos: 91





	1. The Flesh

**Author's Note:**

> You discover in him all the same organs of feeling as in yourself. Answer me, Mechanist, has Nature arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering? Do not suppose that impertinent contradiction in Nature. — Voltaire

[CLICK]

**ARCHIVIST**

It is easier if I record live and can therefore ask any clarifying questions. You are still welcome to make a written statement if you prefer, or in addition. I certainly don't want to limit the amount of information coming into the Institute.

[ARCHIVIST CHUCKLES; THERE IS A LONG SILENCE]

**ROSA**

Yes. My name is Rosa Gutierrez, I heard about you online. You take statements from people who encountered the supernatural?

**ARCHIVIST**

...You could call it that. You had an encounter, I assume.

**ROSA**

Yes. Do I just...start?

**ARCHIVIST**

Ah, one moment. Statement of Rosa Gutierrez regarding some encounters whilst working at a commercial slaughterhouse in Arkansas. Statement taken direct from subject 24th November, 2016. Statement begins.

**ROSA**

I worked for a major meat production company. It wasn't my dream job, but there's not a lot of options in Arkansas for a high school dropout, so when I heard about the position, I applied. Imagine my surprise when they called me back. My slaughterhouse has expanded a lot since I was hired, so even though when I was brought on board they just did poultry, they now do meat, poultry, and others. All sorts. But at the time I was trained on chickens, and that's where the worst of it happened.

I didn't grow up on a farm, like a lot of my coworkers did. They all have stories about watching Da kill a hen for dinner, or going out shooting with their friends. I grew up in a single-wide trailer with my parents and four siblings. We had a dog and he ate store brand kibble. That was my animal experience until I was twenty-two. Technically I'm a high school dropout because I never bothered to get a GED, but it's more that I flunked so many classes they wouldn't let me graduate. So I just left. Got a job at a warehouse moving boxes on third shift. It messed up my sleep schedule, but it paid well and all they wanted was a body that could work hard and fast between ten pm and six am. I’d been there there four years when I heard about a job at a slaughterhouse. The pay was almost double, and they'd let you substitute years worked for academic qualifications. I applied, of course, but didn't realize how much it would matter, the not knowing about animals.

My boss ended up wanting me for three reasons: I'm a US citizen, I speak both English and Spanish, and he knew I could deal with the weight and the noise. The other workers are split between Mexicans here on an expired visa and rednecks who never decided to get out of town. Boss doesn't turn anyone over when ICE comes sniffing around, but he likes to use me as an example. His resident Hispanic citizen. Hoping, probably, that the officers assume all the other Mexicans are citizens too.

But that's not what you wanted from me.

I killed thousands of chickens. Regulations change just about every year, but now the standard is electric waterbaths. It's a little more complicated than most. We get the chickens in on trucks, each one packed full of crates with as many as will fit. It stinks of crap and the moment the light hits them, they all wake up and start screaming. First thing was to unload the crates. Then the next job, which was my job most days, is to pick up a chicken by its neck, swing it upside down, and attach its ankles to the shackles on the conveyor belt. As the belt rolls along, the chicken is pulled deeper into the slaughterhouse. Eventually it reaches the water, which is electrified. When its head enters the water, it gets an electric shock and passes out. At the end of the bath is another worker with a knife.

You learn pretty fast that even though it's _supposed_ to be all humane, and chickens are stupid and don't know what's coming, that's not really true. The trucks come in at all hours so sometimes it's 3 am and mistakes are made. Once someone dropped a crate and hens scattered _everywhere_. But that's rare. More often it's just before shift end and the guys are screwing about with how many times they can spin the chickens before attaching them to the shackles. Stuff like that. I hadn't been working there a month the first time it happened. One of the others, I don't remember his name, grabbed his hen, took her ankles, and swung her around.

I've never felt so dizzy as then. Like all my blood went to my head and then, I dunno, swirled around until I had to sit down, right there on the floor. The guys gave me crap about it, being one of the only women on the floor, wanting to know if I was _okay_ , if I was too soft hearted for the job. I wasn't, though. I've swung a chicken myself, after one of the bastards bit me. But just for a moment, I _felt_ like the chicken.

I didn't realize it then, of course. But that was the first time.

I sat in the break room for a bit, and when I went back out I was fine. I had to work twice as hard for a while to get them all to shut up, and I wrote it off as just a weird coincidence. It's easy, you know, to dismiss things like that. Tell yourself that a dizzy spell has no connection to the cruelty going on around you. Just ignore it. We forget, a lot, that chickens have the same capacity for pain as we do. Even though they can't talk like us or make things like us, I can't imagine you'd like it if someone picked you up by the ankles and swung you around.

I didn’t really believe it though, that chickens feel just like we do, until the next time. See, if the head goes into the water first, the electricity makes a circle and zap, lights out. But if a wing touches, the bird jerks and breaks the circle. And then it's just like sticking your finger into an outlet. I grabbed this chicken and usually they're all sleepy from the truck, but this one was fighting. I got it attached to the shackles somehow, but regulations were that I should've held it back until it was calmer. I didn't. We each had a quota to make and I didn't want to fall behind. So I hooked it up, let it go, and its wing went straight into the water.

I don't know that I thought they could feel pain until that moment. It jerked back and shook—and then the pain hit _me_. Like _I'd_ stuck my finger in the water, which is a mistake you only make once. Just this white flash against my finger, and I was on the floor again and every muscle in my back hurt.

It was July. July 23rd, 2012, and about 80 degrees inside, so everyone thought I'd got heatstroke. They made me go into the break room and drink iced tea. I knew it wasn't heatstroke though, but I just sat there and took it. Heatstroke was easier to explain. Later, I decided it must've been heatstroke combined with a bad fall. It just didn't make sense otherwise. I mean, what else could have happened? I now have a psychic connection to chickens? My aunt is big into that sort of thing, but I'm not. So instead I just tried to forget about it.

I couldn't—can't—explain the next one. Broilers are your basic meat chicken, and they've been bred to grow fast. They're killed before maturity, most times, because at maturity they've got too much meat on them to move. The value of a chicken is based on how long it takes to get to sellable weight, about eight pounds. Shorter is better, so now we've got chickens who double their weight in a week and are sold at 7 weeks. But that comes with a price to the chicken, a price we don't care about. Almost none of the broilers can run properly, and I've heard that the broiler-breeders, their parents, are kept constantly starved, because if they ate all they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to move. And this is, you know, just how it is! Chicken is the most popular meat in the US, did you know that?

Broilers are all supposed to be the same weight when they come in, which usually means they're the same age. Mistakes happen, though. I grabbed a chicken from the crate and it—it was _too_ big. Almost turkey sized, which I knew because I'd worked at the plant through fall by this point. As I picked it up and twisted my wrist to hang it by the ankles, it screamed. Like a full, human, horror movie scream. I dropped it—I mean, what would you do? Of course I dropped it. It hit the ground and that's when I got a good look at it. It's not unusual for chickens to come in already partially plucked—they're nasty, they peck each other all the time—but this one was completely bald. And the more I looked, the more it seemed like it had too many muscles. I'd heard about a mutation for double muscle, but this was more than that. Its wings didn't fold back, but were forced forward like arms. It couldn't walk. Just sat there, tipped forward on its chest because of all the meat, and screamed.

I grabbed it and dashed its head against a wall. We all stared at it until the manager yelled at us for delaying. Then I dumped it in the biohazard bag. I don't know what happened to it after that. I don't know what explanation the manager came up with, and I don't know where it came from. Here's what I do know: The company _dreams_ of a chicken with that much meat on it. And I never, ever want to hear a sound like that again.

That wasn't my last incident with chickens. That happened a month later. We mostly processed human-grade meat, but sometimes we did pet food. Most of those chickens were laying hens, for eggs, and they were a lot older than the broiler chickens. Chickens can live to seven or eight, but they stop producing so many eggs at about two, so that's when the farms send them off to the slaughterhouse. Also they're kept in these cages—which I've never seen, but somehow touching the hens gave me nightmares about them all the same—packed together like sardines, except we have the courtesy to kill the sardines first. And hens are prickly about their personal space, so they peck each other if they don't get it. But hens that are trying to heal from wounds aren't laying so many eggs, so...The farms cut their beaks off. According to them, there’s no need to use any sort of painkiller, so they don’t. Their tongues stick straight up and they make the weirdest noises. 

We were getting a crate of layers off the truck when one of them managed to get out. Again, it's rare, but it does happen, and it's more common in the layers than the broilers just because of their weight. She fell, and I could hear the crack when her keelbone hit the floor. But she got up, and... And it wasn't just her keelbone. It was her legs too, every time she took a step. There was this constant crackling noise as her bones fractured into millions of tiny pieces. And then she began to scream...

That time they had the USDA inspector take a look. He grabbed the hen and the weirdest expression went over his face. Then he dropped her again and began scratching his arm, over and over. We didn't know what to do, everyone just stood there, until he drew blood. Then James—James Arnold—pulled his hand away from his arm and got him to stop. But by that point someone else had grabbed the hen—Alejandro Rodriguez—and almost as quickly dropped her as his fingers...splintered.

There was more, but I don't remember. The hen ran straight for me at the last, I picked her up—because that's what you _do_ , in a slaughterhouse if an animal escapes—and I...

**ARCHIVIST**

You do need to say it, I'm afraid.

**ROSA**

They called it a workplace accident. Covered all of my medical bills. And everyone on the floor got paid time off and free therapy, God knows we needed it. But I...

I don't have a nose. Not a natural one anymore. Somehow, that hen took off my nose and part of my upper jaw. Just like...just like debeaking.

[SOUNDS OF HEAVY BREATHING]

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement—

**ROSA**

No, there's more. It's okay.

I was off work for nine months but then. I had to go back. Even the therapist agreed, it would be good for me to get back to work and to work there. But they transferred me to cattle. It's different from chickens. For one thing, you don't use a waterbath. Cattle get the captive bolt gun and then a knife to the chest. Also you don't grab cattle. Maybe that's obvious. I'd never met a cow before so it wasn't, really. They come off the truck into these metal corridors, called chutes, that are so narrow they have to walk single file to the captive bolt gun. But cattle are stupid and slow and balk at everything, so my job was to walk on the catwalks above them and goad them along.

I should...I shouldn't say that, really. I don't think they're stupid anymore. But I did think that. And I did use an electric cattle prod. We were encouraged to process the cattle as fast as we could—if we ran out of cattle, we got an extra break—so I'd prod any who had stopped for a moment.

After the chickens, I was pretty jumpy anyway, so it took me a while to realize something else was happening. I would step out into the sun and have to freeze for a minute to let my eyes adjust—and not, don't say that's normal. My friends tried that and then they saw it happen, and it takes _a minute_. I can't see anything for a minute after moving from dark to light or back again. Which was odd, but sometimes things happen, you know? And after everything else it was just, well, one more thing. So I didn't think anything of it until we got a new USDA inspector, one who had just gotten her degree. She pulled me over at lunch one day and said, exact words, "You should give the cattle more time to start moving after they enter the building. It takes their eyes much longer to adjust than ours."

I blew her off, but it stuck with me. Their eyes take more time to adjust. I should wait until they adjust. And a week later, Carlos hit me with the cattle prod—in jest—when I had just stepped outside and was waiting until I could see again. I _got_ it then. Somehow, and it was exactly like with the chickens, I had eyes like a cow. I took longer, after that, to start using the prod when the cattle arrived.

If it had just been that...I don't know. It was scary, don't get me wrong, but it was almost...useful. I started trying to understand how the cattle thought, if they do such a thing, and found some papers and books on it. There's a lot out there if you just start looking. Some of the others gave me crap about it, but since it didn't increase injuries, management didn't care. It meant I and whoever I was with took longer, but over time I found others who agreed with me and we got scheduled together a lot.

But it wasn't just that. I...They're not afraid of dying. But they are afraid of the sound of the metal chutes. They're not afraid of blood, but they'll refuse to move because someone left a jacket on the gate. They make friends. They have favorite people. They like to taste everything, just to see, even if they don't actually like to eat all that many things. I _knew_ what the cows were feeling, and why, and even when it made me a better worker, it was... They are _so scared_. Not of the gun, God no. But of the chutes, of the strange people and the pain they can't predict, of the way they're being separated from their friends, of the weird lighting and odd shapes. That's what scares a cow.

I had to quit.

It got worse towards the end. I couldn't tell if it was the cow or me going into the squeeze box. Once somehow I ended up with the captive bolt gun pointed at my head. No one had an explanation for that. I stopped talking. Then there was...I uh, I got confused, I was on the captive bolt gun and I shot the chute so the cows all tried to bolt. The last incident was, well.

We got dairy cows in, sometimes. They were too old to give milk, so they’d been sent off to slaughter. A high yield dairy cow expends more calories in milk than she can possibly take in in fodder, but if she’s too fat when she gives birth the calf will get stuck. The result is by the time the milk dries up, dairy cows are horrifyingly skinny. At some point, the farmers aren’t getting enough out of them to make the feed worth it, and rather than feed them up on grass for a couple months before selling them on, they just send them straight to slaughter.

So we got in this load of cows, and every one of them had her hips jutting out and I could count the ribs. It’s horrible, really, what people will do in order to scrape a few extra pennies. I’d seen enough by then that I didn’t rush them. They weren’t familiar with the chutes and didn’t like the noise the floor made when they stepped along it, but they did move in steadily. This lot was coming in before lunch, so I was hungry anyway but it was worse than normal. I just put it down to the time of month and made sure the cows were following each other closely—once one gets out of sight, it can be hard to persuade the others to catch up. By the time we started processing the cows, I was starving. Not just hungry, but practically faint. I kept working though. You get used to a lot, in a slaughterhouse.

Eventually my partner that shift, Enrique Martinez, told me to go take a few. I asked why, and he said I looked like hell. I went off to the bathroom to run water over my face. Sometimes that helped when I was feeling lightheaded. I tripped and fell going in—just a normal accident, caught my shoe on the sill. But once I was down I couldn’t stand up. My legs were trembling and any time I tried to put weight on them, they shook so hard I fell back down.

No one else was in the bathroom at that point, so I took a risk and looked down my shirt. Here’s a secret about breasts: While your breasts might be larger than your friend’s at the same weight, when _you_ gain or lose weight, your breasts gain and lose too. So it was pretty shocking to see them still the same size, but my stomach concave. My pants felt loose and that made sense now, because the only thing keeping them on was the drawstring. Otherwise my hips stuck out—just like the cows’—and I could guess that the reason I couldn’t stand was the muscle was gone from my legs.

It didn’t...it didn’t get better lying there. I hoped it would, that distance from the cows would help, but it didn’t. Eventually I had to call for help. It was another of those unexplained mysteries and was written up as another workplace accident, details confidential. I resigned on the spot. Two horrifying, body altering events was too many— _one_ probably was, but I hadn’t learned in time.

I had to go to the regional hospital for refeeding. They thought I was anorexic, and I didn’t correct them. If anyone wondered why anorexia was covered under workman’s comp, they didn’t ask me. I have a new job now, compliance with the USDA, and that's okay. Pays enough for me to go on vacation here, at any rate, and once I was here I thought I should make a statement.

And I—humans argue a lot, you know, about whether cows are afraid of dying. They're not. I can say that now. But they are afraid, horribly afraid, of _us_. The most valuable tool to us is their fear of you. Even without knowing what we've done to them, or understanding that they're not meant to grow that fast, or caring at all about death—we’re still a cow's worst nightmare. It's not the dying. And it's not even that we eat them, except that the only difference between eating beef and eating humans is public opinion. They don't...they know that they _could_ be happy. I know that I could be happy. And they're not, because it's too expensive. They don't understand that. They just want a little more than what we give them, and we refuse. Not for their benefit, but our own.

Doesn't that make us the villain?

[PAUSE]

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement...ends.

**ROSA**

I'll go then.

[CLICK]

* * *

[CLICK]

**ARCHIVIST**

Supplemental. Well. I am...limited in what research can be done, except to verify that there was an incident at the named abattoir in a small town in Arkansas in 2012 which resulted in all employees present receiving over a month of sick leave, and that Rosa Gutierrez did work there at that time. That certainly had some similarities to previous statements, particularly David Laylow's. Both worked in an abattoir, both had...unusual encounters on the killing floor. But where David Laylow's was with another human, Rosa Gutierrez seemed to meet something entirely different. Or would that be multiple somethings? At any rate, I am somewhat more inclined to take her statement at face value than I was initially with David Laylow. There seem to be a number of statements involving _meat_ and it would be rash to discard them without further investigation.

End supplemental.

[CLICK]


	2. The Corruption

[CLICK]

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement of Josh Pleasant, regarding crickets. Original statement given May 14th, 2012. Statement recorded by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute. Statement begins.

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

I won't name them, but I worked for a large chain pet supply store. You've heard of them. Part of my job involves bagging crickets--I suppose you don't know what that means, really. See, a lot of people have pet reptiles--bearded dragons and so on. And those guys need live crickets for nutrition or whatever, but crickets are delicate so they live in bins with food in the staff room. Everyday about a dozen people come in needing me to bag crickets.

It's the newbie's job, always. Newbie gets the worst jobs, and that means bagging crickets. Why? They stink, they scuttle, some of the customers want  _ exact  _ numbers and have you tried to count six dozen crickets in a plastic bag? Yeah. Some always escape too, and while most of the managers are cool about it, there's one who always gets on my case . Tells me to go catch them. So then I get down on my knees and get to fish around under the shelves for some little bastard who's only going to die in a day anyway. Complete waste of time. But yeah, bagging crickets.

It started about a week into the job. That'd be... 28 September, 2011. A man came in. He was taller than normal and very...skinny. Like...concerningly skinny. And he was wearing a brown coat about two sizes too big. He wanted fourteen crickets.

Here's how bagging works. Usually there's a lot of crickets, so I take a funnel and a bag, put the bag under the end of the funnel. Then I go over to the bin, open it up, and shake egg cartons over the funnel until I've got enough. So I does that for the man, tie off the bag and hand it to him, and he says, "There's fifteen in here."

I say, "Yeah, I'll still ring you up for fourteen, don't worry." Nobody cares about  _ exactly  _ how many crickets you ring out, as long as it's about right, except again, that one manager.

He gets this real intense look on his face and leans in. I'm not  _ tiny _ , right, but I'm shorter than the average, so there's a lot of leaning. "I asked for fourteen," he says, weirdly emphatic.

I undo the bag and dump precisely one cricket back into the bin because it's just not worth it. Some customers are just  _ arseholes  _ and it's not worth it to get in a fight with them. So he gets his exactly fourteen crickets and goes home without complaining to my boss, which is all I really care about. The next time I go bag some crickets there's a lot more of them in the bin than I remember, but it's probably just bad memory.

Most of our clients buy crickets weekly, so a week later he comes back. He is, I swear, wearing the  _ exact  _ same outfit. He wants fourteen crickets.

I get him fourteen crickets. Some people are nasty enough to be memorable even though retail is hell and it all blends together, and he was one of them.

Again, there's more crickets in the bin than I'd expected. This time it's notable. That morning, Kris had put a note at the register saying we only had twenty larges left and to leave a couple for our own lizards to eat that night. But after I sell the fourteen crickets to the asshole, there are easily fifty larges sitting in there. Quiet. Not moving. But fifty of them all the same.

I ragged Kris for not counting the crickets properly, and he just looked at me, baffled. He was insistent that there had only been twenty, and I was still too new to risk pushing it. That Friday I was assigned to clean the cricket bin. You do this by dumping it into an empty bin, sweeping all of them into a pile, waiting for the live ones to crawl out, sweeping up the dead and dying, and spraying down the old bin. Then you return them all plus some new food and egg cartons. It's not a hard task but no one likes to do it. Again, I was the new guy, so it was my job. I don't  _ like  _ crickets, I would like nothing more than to throw them all out in the trash but there's something to it, when you're sorting living from dead.

I don't know. I don't have any evidence, but when I went to tip the dead into the rubbish, there wasn't anything in my dustpan. And later that night as I was throwing out the remains of dinner, there was a pile of dead crickets in my kitchen bin.

I threw them out, of course. Most likely my flatmate had just been screwing about, uncovered something, and thrown it in the bin. That was all it was. That was all it  _ could  _ be.

The next week, asshole was back. He still wanted fourteen crickets, but he said one had died on his way home, so they needed to be fourteen  _ lively  _ crickets. Bastard. I got him fourteen  _ lively  _ crickets and then told him that if he wanted to be absolutely sure, better buy fifteen. That was a mistake. He just  _ looked  _ at me and went off to pay. This time, when I had to get more larges for a lady with a tarantula, there were  _ definitely  _ too many. Like, all of the egg cartons were solid with crickets. I get the lady her three larges, but it sticks with me, the way they bump into my hands when I'm trying to shake them into the bag.

Nothing really happens that week except that my flatmate breaks up with his girlfriend and I have to put up with some really awful emo music coming from his room. But the next time the guy comes in, I'm also the only one on register, which means I get to both catch his crickets and ring him out. I get exactly fourteen extremely lively crickets and take the bag up to the register, and that's when this gets weird. Fourteen crickets at twelve p a cricket comes out to one pound sixty eight, but that's not what he counts out. He counts out some honest to God  _ shillings  _ and shoves them over at me. Before I try to tell him his coins aren't legal tender, I check the coins. There's two crowns, three florins, and four shillings, and not a one of them is newer than 1950. They've all got George VI on them!

I shove them back and say he'll have to pay with something else, I can't take these coins. He gets this really snotty look on his face and leans in over the register. "Do you have a problem with my money?"

It's not that I haven't heard him talk before, and his accent isn't anything to comment on--London, neither educated nor particularly full of slang--but my  _ God  _ his mouth stunk. It was like the worst bits of an alley and a compost heap. I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't seen a dentist in  _ years _ . It was apparent he hadn't been to a bank either. My register doesn’t have any way to put in 'customer paid in pre-decimalisation coinage' so I call over the manager on duty.

It happens to be Kris, who just looks at the guy and hits something on the register. It doesn't make any sense for a register running Windows 98 to have a pre-decimal function but turns out it does anyway. I ring him up, hand him his receipt, and send him on his way. Then I turn to Kris.

Only Kris doesn't know  _ anything  _ about what just happened. He doesn't remember any of that. He's certain we don't accept shillings. He gets on my case about it a bit, for accepting counterfeit currency until I dare him to open the coin drawer. He does. It only has normal coins in it.

When I clean out the cricket bin the next day, it is overflowing with crickets. Usually I can pull out the food dish and only have to knock off one or two live crickets, which is gross enough honestly but if I do it fast it doesn't bother me so much. But this time it was literally solid with crickets. I took the hand broom and swept them off, but they just climbed back on--not organized like ants. They climbed over each other to get to the newly open space first, one dragging half a shed behind it, still stuck to its legs. Another was missing one hind leg and limped along. Those probably wouldn't survive to be sold--crickets are cannibals.

I have to grit my teeth to pick up the food bowl. The crickets scurry away but not fast enough. My thumb comes down on a larger one--maybe it was dead already, I don't know--and just...There's a crunch, and then it squishes. They're not as hard as you'd think. I recoil and drop the food bowl, and then swear under my breath. Now I have to pick it back up,  _ and  _ it’s covered in crickets,  _ and _ now there’s food all over and complicating things.

I get the bin cleaned. I don't swear in front of customers. I throw out the dead crickets and go on my break and want to have a drink or several.

That night there's a bloody cricket singing under my bed.

Two more weeks and the asshole comes back twice more, and I'm getting used to it. Sure, it means there are more crickets in the bin afterward,  _ way _ more. But that's good for the store, right? Surely? And yeah, there are crickets under my bed, even though I can't see them. But it's soothing, sort of.

After that, though, it gets weird. Weirder. I suppose it's my fault. I don't know if the guy came before I was hired, or what, but now he only comes when I'm on shift and available to pick crickets. But that day he came in when there was a rush, so I just shoveled the crickets in and handed him the bag. He paid in modern currency and then said, "There's two dead in here."

"I didn't ring you up for them," I said, and beckon the next person forward.

He stands there, and I would  _ swear  _ he smells like rotten eggs. Definitely smells strong and nasty, like a fart but  _ worse _ . "Oh," he says, long and drawn out, more like a sigh than a word. "You'll regret that."

I don't think anything of it until I get home. Plenty of customers are upset, you get used to it working retail. But then I open the fridge for leftover takeaway, and it's full...of crickets. They're dead. There's not enough of them to spill onto the floor, but like. The normal number of crickets in my fridge is  _ zero _ , and there are now, honestly, probably a hundred crickets. I think I'm hallucinating actually. That working retail and eating takeaway ten times a week is causing me to hallucinate crickets in my fridge.

It had been a long shift anyway so I just, close my eyes and reach in for the bag. If the crickets are a hallucination, they're a tactile one as well, because they...these are more rotten than the usual ones, and they  _ squish _ . My fingers close on them and they give way, and my fingers are coated in sticky, thick insect guts. I freeze and clench my hand unconsciously. That was a mistake: They slip around and I am hideously, thoroughly aware of what, exactly, cricket innards feel like.

Slowly, I pull my hand back. It's holding the bag of takeaway, but the bag itself, as well as my hand, are covered in crickets. Even though they're dead, they don't fall off immediately, not until my arm starts shaking and they lose their grip. Then there's a rain of dead crickets over the floor. They bounce, rather than splat, and land in all directions, legs and antennae sticking out. One of them lands in such a way that somehow, it chirps. Every hair on my back stands up at that, and that's when I drop the bag.

_ That  _ splats on the floor with the remains of my teriyaki, and the crickets just...squish.

I don't scream. Is that a good thing? I don't, at any rate. But I'm not hungry anymore. I make myself get the vacuum, because I can't make my flatmate clean this up, and dispose of the bag and...go play World of Warcraft.

For some reason the next week is forgettable. Or at least I forget it. Until the guy comes in and orders his fourteen crickets. He...smiles. I don't say  _ a thing  _ and just get him his crickets. He pays, but when I open the cash drawer it's got crickets  _ in it _ . And Kris doesn't believe me that I didn't put them in there, so in addition to having to move them to the--now overflowing--bin, I also get written up for screwing around. I'm sent to clean the cricket bins shortly after, so I get to see the full effect of the guy. It's incredible how many crickets are in there. The walls and floor of the bin are solid crickets, packed so tight they can only move their antennae, but then there's a layer of crickets on top of  _ them _ . I try to tip them into the cleaning bin but some spill out immediately, and then the rest go  _ all over _ . Like, not just the normal handful jumping to freedom under the shelves, but hundreds of crickets flinging themselves out into oblivion and landing improbably far from the bin. I struggle to set the bin upright again, but in the meantime there are so many crickets places they shouldn't be and Kris is coming down with a face like thunder.

He chews me out for being clumsy, and normally I'd mouth off but by this point the crickets are crawling up the side of the bin and onto my hand, and I'm too horrified to say anything. I know crickets can't really bite but for some reason I'm scared stiff that these will. I just stand there, frozen, as they crawl over my skin, pressing so lightly I can barely feel, until Kris notices.

He goes absolutely  _ white  _ and just tells me to finish up quickly. I wait until he walks away and then, gently, brush the crickets off my hand. I have to get a second bin for the overflow. We don't talk about it. But after that there are crickets everywhere. They're in my bag when I get it out of the lockers and I squish one going for my keys. They're on the handrails of the bus I take home, and it's so crammed I can't but hold on, brushing them to the floor. Nobody else notices. But worst is how they're in my loo.

They're not just... They're not just on things. Which they are. I have to brush them off of the toilet seat and spend the entire time thinking about  _ what if they jump _ \- They don't, there are no crickets in my pants, but just the thought was enough to make me think I needed to do something about this. No, the thing that really got me moving is what happens when I turn the tap on. I've already got one hand under, I don't like to waste water, but it's not water that comes out. It's a stream of crickets. They hit my hands and jump off in this unceasing flow, and, I'm not ashamed to say it, I scream. When there's enough crickets, they rustle, and I swear I hear that in my dreams now. Or even when it's quiet.

I turned the tap off, and it only spat a few more at me. I shake them off and now it's just me and the thousand large crickets in my sink.

I... can't tell you what I was thinking then. I don't know if crickets are flammable but I was pretty bloody content to find out. But instead they start taking themselves down the shower drain, neat as you please, and I just stare.

I gave my notice at work the next day. And then, well, one of my friends thinks he sees ghosts in old buildings and he said to come to you. I think he's barking but the crickets were...Well. Here I am.

**ARCHIVIST**

End statement. Well indeed. I sent Sasha to investigate, and it seems that Josh Pleasant did work for the stated pet store from September 21st, 2011 through November 16th of the same year. His manager confirmed that he was a reliable worker who had some difficulty handling crickets but provided no specifics. Tim was able to contact Josh through the phone number he left, but Josh only repeated the basics of this statement. He  _ did  _ provide contact information for his flatmate at the time, an Isaiah Cohen. However, when Isaiah was contacted,  _ he  _ said Josh was a decent enough flatmate but even when prompted didn't remember anything about crickets.

Frankly, given the nature of insect phobias I'm inclined to disregard this statement in its entirety. No one else remembers anything exceptional, and insect phobias are notoriously vivid and persistent. The only detail that perplexes me is this: Josh Pleasant's cricket purchaser matches exactly the description given in case number 0121911 of John Amherst. It could be nothing... It, most likely, is nothing. There are many tall, slender gentlemen with ill-fitting suits. Still...there is something about this.

End recording.

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	3. The Slaughter

[CLICK]

**GERTRUDE**

Statement of Angus McConnell, regarding sheep worrying. Statement given August 24th, 2011. Statement recorded by Gertrude Robinson. Statement begins.

**GERTRUDE (STATEMENT)**

Crofting is in my blood. My father eventually retired and bought a little place just outside Edinburgh city centre, but before that, he'd lived on the same croft on Nine Mile Burn, near Penicuik, his whole life. Before that, it was my grandfather's, and before that, as far back as anybody knows, it was in his line. My father went away to Glasgow for uni after the war and that's where he met my mother, who decided that smallholding sounded much better than being a teacher. So that was them, and they had me and my brothers, but neither of them wanted the land. So it went to me.

Now I've got some acres and right to pasture on some more, and where I'm not much for the planting, I do like sheep. I have around two hundred Scottish blackface on the Pentlands, depending on time of year, and between them and the missus, who  _ does _ like teaching, we do well enough. I make sure to go up and check on them about once a month, or more when it's lambing, but they largely take care of themselves. They're easy keepers, sheep are. All I need to worry about is if the ewes are lambing properly, and make sure they get tupped by the right ram and not that blighter from Cadman's croft. It's only twice that I need my hands on them, unless summat's gone wrong with the lambing. In May, I round them up for shearing, which I do with my mates, and in October the lambs I'm not keeping I round up for taking to market. We make a proper day of it, the missus and I, and occasionally we've enough lambs to go to market two weeks in a row.

That's quite enough about me I should think. Just so's you know that the sheep are important. I'm not a hobby farmer. It's my job.

It was February last year when it started. I was up the hills with the dogs, trying to find one of my ewes who'd been tupped early on and should be about to lamb, when I stumbled over summat else instead. 'Twas one of my ewes right enough, though fortunately one who'd not taken that year. She'd been worried, right enough, and even with snow coming down I could see where a damned dog had opened her from hip to belly. It would not a been an easy death but I must say, my first thought was to be glad the ATV wasn't too far. Fallen stock are to be taken to the knacker, and sheep aren't so light I want to carry one down the hillside.

I don't suppose you know anything all the way down here about sheep worrying. There's some dogs that see a sheep and just see something fun to chase, like a ball but larger. That's as well as may be for the dog, but the sheep sees a dog and they see a  _ wolf _ . Sheep panic easy, they run easy, but they don't think much. Pretty soon after a dog gets in with them, you've got the whole flock bunched up against a fence. And then if I'm  _ lucky _ , the dog just runs around and the only sheep I lose are lambs from stress, or putting a leg wrong and breaking it. But more often, the dog goes on to take a chunk from the sheep, and that's what happened to this ewe.

I had a fair good idea who had done it, too. Most of the old folks around here have sheep themselves, or know better, and their dogs are quiet as houses when they come near my sheep. But a number of them has jobs in the city and just live out here for the atmosphere, and  _ they _ don't know when to put their dogs on lead and when to not. So they comes up here with some spaniel what's never seen a sheep, and the little blighter just goes mad for them, and all of a sudden their dog's two fields away and a half dozen sheep are dead. That's sheep worrying. It's illegal, but then, so's being drunk in public.

I checked on the rest of the flock. All well, though a few were fair shaken up, and I got the ewe back home without fuss.

I go to the pub with the lads on Fridays, and that week I had a tale to tell. There's four of us, all Pentlands men. Thomas Cadman, Rory Hochkins, James Bolton, and me. We all keep sheep--Cadman has that awful ram, but he's not a bad sort otherwise--and Hochkins bought the first round when I said I had lost an ewe. We all had a good blather about the sort of berks who bring an out of control dog up the hills in February, when everyone with any sense knows the ewes are about to lamb. Bolton said if any of his had triplets he'd gift me the third to raise and I told him only if he did the nursing as I've no patience for it.

Generally during the spring I go up to check on ewes every other day until they start dropping, and then it's every day. You never know when they'll go into labour--they have the worst timing, for they're right prone to doing it at half three in the morning--and while most the time they do alright, sometimes things go wrong and then you want to be on hand. So the next day I took the dogs up again to have a check. Now, it's not unusual to have an incident of worrying once a year or so. Often times I don't even report them to the police. But it is fair odd to have two in a single week.

None of the ewes were dead this time, but they were all shaken up, and one had a broken leg. I don't generally keep my shotgun on me, so's I had to carry her to the ATV and down to the barn before I could put her out of her misery. That was a good ewe too, and close to lambing. Sheep are right daft, and likely what happened is the dog started chasing them, she panicked, and put a foot in a molehill. Snapped the bone clean through.

I called up the local vet that night, just to warn them. I thought it probable it was the same dog and veterinarians know better than any which dogs are most like to be worrying. If anyone came in with a dog who'd got a few more scratches than he should, they'd call the police.

Only, and this is when I started to be real worried, the next day I go up, there was an ewe with a breech birth and two who had been savaged. Neither of them would make it, and by this point I had my shotgun with me just in case, so I dealt with them and then pulled the stuck lamb. One of the dead ewes had given birth without difficulty, twins, so I supposed that Bolton won out about bottle feeding after all. I put them in the ATV and took them home. The missus loves to bottle feed, it reminds her of her students, so she took to the lambs just as fast as they took to her.

But now I'd had three attacks in a week. That's not normal. That's someone with a grudge or a dog that's gotten a taste for blood. I finally called the police, and then went on the internet and ordered a camera. It meant bringing the sheep in closer, but I could excuse that on the grounds of lambing, and then a single good camera would cover enough of the field to be of use.

It was three days before the camera arrived but there wasn't any attacks in that time. I took the camera out and set it up, then brought the sheep down the hills. A few were none too happy about the change, but it gave the dogs a good run. Next time I was at the pub I told the lads about it, whinged about it really--the cost of the camera added on to the loss of my ewes and what the knacker would charge and I was looking at a pretty tight summer before selling the lambs in the autumn. Hochkins said he was sure it couldn't be that tight, and just about  _ said _ that if I was doing my job proper, I wouldn't be so cut up about a few dead ewes. We almost came to blows, but Cadman and Bolton separated us. After that, well. Hochkins and I weren't talking. Bolton and I had words on nursing lambs, but all Cadman had to say was I should have used his ram. I don't know  _ what _ he thought that would do about a bleeding dog, and told him so, but he just kept stubbornly saying it. So I went home.

Next day I went up, there had been another attack. Bloody dog. Two ewes this time, and it had caught one partway through lambing. The ewe had gone down from a torn throat, skin peeled off and blood covering the grass. But the lamb hadn't even gotten out before the dog's jaws came down on its head. The dog hadn't eaten it, just opened its skull and left it there. I put them both in the ATV. The other ewe hadn't lambed yet and never would now.

I took the camera back and had a good look at it. At that distance, the quality was poor. There was just enough to see that it was no dog attacking my sheep. It was a person.

I called the police promptly that time, and they said they would be out to look at it. They never came. The knacker at least turned up. The next day my ewes were fine, if upset, but there were three dead lambs. Thinking now it was a person, I looked at the wounds closer. Not teeth and jaws, it seemed, but a dull knife and a hammer. At least, that was my best guess how a person could do that to a sheep's chest.

When I went to the pub that Friday, it was like I was raving. No one believed me that it was a person, not a dog. Bolton and Hochkins were both on about why would someone do that, and all Cadman said was it was more likely to just be a dog regardless. Even when I showed them the footage. They wouldn't believe me. I tried to show them, and they just bought me another round and said it was a string of bad luck.

There was another attack that Saturday and that time, the camera went missing. The scene was horrific though; more than enough that I would have reported it even if it was the first attack. A dozen ewes had been savaged, and now that I knew it was a human doing the savaging, it seemed they had stopped trying to hide it. Each of them had been killed in the same way: First a cut to the throat, and then a long, jagged tear up the belly so their guts spilled out on the ground. Worse, every one of them had been close to lambing, and their lambs had been pulled out, their heads smashed in with a hammer. Offal and brains covered the pasture. The remainder of the flock were clumped in a corner. Two of them had miscarried from the stress. After putting the carcasses in the ATV, I moved the flock to the next pasture--not out of any real hope that it would do anything, but at least they wouldn't be there, with the gore I hadn't been able to clean up.

I called the police. The police were busy. Incidents of sheep worrying aren't high on police radar, which is part of why I don't tend to report them. But I'd now lost eighteen ewes and as many lambs, and with a flock my size, that's right hard to recover from. The missus and I had a sitdown to talk about options. We didn't have much in the way of savings, but fortunately, price of lamb goes up in the spring, when most farmers aren't selling. There were a half dozen ewes who hadn't quickened, so those I could send to auction without losing a future sale. Plus, while I'd meant to keep two rams for a while yet, Prince had a good few years left in him so selling Willie, who was younger and could therefore sell for more, wouldn't put me back.

Auctions are on Tuesdays, so Monday I called in to tell them I'd have six ewes and a ram for sale, and then went up the hills to fetch them. I counted the remainder just to be sure, noted that there were four new lambs, and returned home, driving the seven in front of me.

On the way, I passed Cadman on his way up to his flock. Even at the time I thought it odd, as he pastured his sheep further north and usually didn't take this track. With other matters to worry about, though, I continued home, and the next day went to auction. So it wasn't until Wednesday that I went back up the hills.

There were another three dead ewes. Of their five lambs, four were also dead. The last was standing and bleating, tail twitching, hock deep in its mother's blood. I couldn't even be surprised. It had reached that point where the gore ceases shocking and instead becomes a bizarre new normal. Except for the financial loss, it was hard to care. I had the dogs--my dogs, trained for this, and who know better than to ever put mouth on a sheep--fetch in the lamb to add to the bottle feeding collection. There was only so many I could hand raise, though, and at some point I would have to confront the issue of slaughtering or selling the orphans.

The next time, I actually hoped. I was up there earlier than normal, hoping to catch the bastard in the act. And I did. And I hoped the police would listen, and he would be arrested, and everything could go back to normal. That was the worst of it. The hope lost. It was raining steadily, hard enough to plaster my windbreaker to me, as I went up with a camera to document whatever I would find. I found the flock readily enough--they were running, too fast for safety, sideways across the hill. Behind them, a lump in his navy jumper, was Cadman. He had a butcher's knife in one hand and a hammer in the other, and both were red with blood. There was already a ewe down.

I must've yelled, although I can't remember what I said, and only got the ATV into park before leaping out. I had the shotgun but didn't think of it. All I thought of was getting a picture, so I had proof. I struggled toward him, into the wind and up the hill, with the rain hard on my face. He finally heard me, or responded, and he turned and bore down on me. I hit the shutter once, twice, still running at him. But he was... You have to understand, Cadman and me, we went to secondary school together. He's got piss-poor taste in sheep but he's a good man. And that day, he charged at me like a ram himself, hit me across the shoulder with the hammer, and sent me flying across the scrub. It's a miracle I didn't brain myself there and then. He was over me before I could get upright, with that knife raised--and I knew that knife, I'd been to tea at his place before and helped with the washing up, and I knew that I was gonna turn out just like all my poor ewes.

It were the dogs what saved me. Bess and Jesse, collies who've never shown a tooth to anyone in their life. Don't know if they sensed summat wrong with him or what, but they came at him like they do at sheep, and Jesse grabbed his elbow and sank in.

He made a noise, not a human one, not rightly, and staggered. I was still down in the mud, starting to be proper scared, when Bess hit him right in the gut from a running start. Cadman crumpled and dropped the knife. I got up and, God help me, I ran. Whatever he was going to do to my sheep, I'd be damned if I'd let him do it to  _ me _ . I didn't even remember the shotgun. I just threw the ATV into drive and called the dogs to jump in.

When I got home, I discovered I hadn't turned the camera on. I hadn't gotten any pictures. I called the police regardless, but they said it was hallucinations from the fall. I tried telling them that no, I'd seen Cadman  _ before _ the fall, but they didn't listen. So I hung up. Probably didn't do the case any good but if they weren't going to listen to me, I wasn't going to help them.

I called Bolton next though, and he listened to me. Then he says he hadn't wanted to make a fuss, but he'd lost a handful of ewes too, and suspected it weren't just dogs. We planned to go up and check on our sheep together the next day, for safety. I would bring the camera again, and he went hunting in the autumn and would bring his gun. It didn't work out that way though. In the morning I loaded the dogs in and prepared to head up, but Bolton didn't show. Eventually I went over to his house. The Mrs Bolton had passed away year before, so it was just him there. His dogs were making a racket out in the garden, which were a bit of a surprise. Bolton was a neat fellow, not one to leave the dogs out unwatched. But there they were, and I whistled them all together just to be sure. Then I knocked on the door.

No one answered. It went on long enough that I went round the back to see if summat was up.The back door had been kicked in and was hanging in splinters. There was a trail of mud from the door through to the sitting room, and there I found Bolton. What was left of him. Cadman must've caught him unawares, for he was still on the sofa. Between the hammer and the knife, there wasn't much left of Bolton's face or hands. Otherwise he was largely untouched.

I had to make a stop in Bolton's lav and then called the police again. Or, again, tried to. They didn't even pick up this time, the wankers.

It's a funny thing the mind does, when you find someone dead. I called the police, but now what? As far as I knew, Bolton's son had gone away and I didn't have his phone. Beyond that... I didn't know. So I put all the dogs, his and mine, in the ATV and went up to check on his sheep. A number were dead. I was hardly surprised. Presumably Cadman had done for Bolton and then gone off on Bolton's sheep. The why though bothered me. Cadman was a crofter like us; he wasn't a murderer. And this was so far from  _ Murder She Wrote _ \--none of those had ever involved dozens of dead sheep.

After talking with the missus that night, we decided 'twas best if I didn't go up the hill for the next couple days. If Cadman wanted me, he could come get me in person--and outnumbered--and the sheep just weren't worth my life. That lasted two days, and then we ran out of fresh bread. My wife is a lovely lady but she can't bake and nor can I, so we needed to go to Tesco.

The missus drove. I sat in the passenger seat with the shotgun on my legs, and the laws be damned. If the police don't want me carrying it loaded, they can very well pick up their phones. We were on the A766 when Cadman just stepped out from the hedgerows in front of the car. If my wife didn't have such a lead foot, we would've run over him. As it was, it were a near thing. Neither of us got out, just watched him, myself swearing a blue streak and the missus, it was plain to see, thinking about how it'd be better if she had the gun.

He stood there a moment. He looked like hell, as well he should. He was still wearing his navy jumper but it looked like it'd been dragged through the mud and left out to dry. There were scrapes all over his face and hands. And he was holding that knife in one hand. For all that, though, he didn't move to attack us. He just stood there, looking half dead.

I'll remember what he said next for the rest of my life.

"Angus, shoot me." It was like something in him was pushing the words out. He was saying them, there was no doubt, but there was something else in his body, something which controlled him and which wanted, very badly, to kill me. "Please, I need...I can't."

I couldn't move. I'm no coward, but something about the way Cadman was standing there, face and jaw moving in eerie separation, scared me to the bone.

The words burst out of his mouth again. " _ I want to kill you _ ," he said in pained desperation. "It's making me--I  _ want _ , I killed your sheep." He was verging on incoherence, and yet...unwilling to move. In a second, his face shifted, becoming monstrous and cruel. "Loss Without Cause, the chant of unvalued deaths, blood which is spilled for no purpose, only horror..." He seemed to get control of himself, shaking violently. "Angus,  _ please _ ."

I stepped out of the car. I didn't know if I could shoot him, but it was evident something was wrong.

The moment my foot touched the ground he lunged at me, snarling like a dog. I didn't have a chance to do anything with the shotgun but swing it wildly, and by sheer luck got him in the head. He didn't crumple like a drunk, though, just rolled with it. When he came upright again, he ran into the heather and out of sight.

My wife and I, well, we didn't know what to do. I suppose we could have called the police, but they hadn't been much help so far and I didn't have much hope of that changing. So we just went on to Tesco, did the shopping, and returned home.

I didn't leave the house much for the next couple days. We decided that whatever danger the sheep would get into on their own would be nothing compared to what would happen if Cadman found me in the open again. I don't know why, but he didn't come after me at home.

It was three days later that the police finally turned up. At first I thought they were there about my sheep, and told them so, but no. They said that there had been a series of murders in Carlops, some of which had gone unreported for days, and they were going to all the residences in the area to see who was missing. I told them they'd be best off looking at Cadman, and they said they'd already been.

They said that his house was abandoned but the floor covered in blood. Samples had been sent for DNA testing but they didn't have results yet. And no one knew where Thomas Cadman was.

As far as I know, they still don't. It's been two months now, but there haven't been any more killings. The government doesn't want me talking about it so much, so I got a nice chunk of money for my sheep, enough to carry me over the next year till I can build my flock back up. In the meantime, I was in London anyway visiting my wife's brother, and thought you'd deserved to hear this.

**GERTRUDE**

Statement ends. Well. Given the summary, I had almost hoped that this would be another encounter with the Flesh, but it seems not to be. While the Flesh is more animalistic, this contains the Slaughter's trademark of random, often-escalating violence. I had Michael do the followup. Thomas Cadman has been charged with the murders of twenty three people with a knife; as yet the courts have not seen fit to add on the further crime of animal abuse. As far as I understand the Slaughter, it seems that it did not have as firm a grasp as it might wish, and to his credit, Thomas Cadman resisted. I only wish that he could be remembered as such instead of, as is perhaps inevitable, as the villain.

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	4. The Web

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that this chapter contains chimpanzee-on-chimpanzee sexual assault and take care of yourself accordingly.

[CLICK]

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement of Katherine Dawkins, concerning chimpanzee politics in Tanzania. Original statement given December 21st, 2008. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

I'm going to start with the racism baked into the safari industry, because I don't get to rant about it in my professional life. If you book a safari to Africa, you are doing so on the backs of the dead and the enslaved. Oh, I'm sure there's a good organization here or there but most of them take far more from the local communities than they give. Worst of all, just by calling it a 'safari', they promote the idea that Africa is this Other place, a strange and foreign land where bizarre things happen. People fly in, they take thousands of photos and encourage wildlife to associate with humans, and then they fly out again and never give the continent a second thought.

I should know, I'm a tour guide for a company based out of Kigoma, Tanzania. I'm not about to say which one, I do like my job. I spend nine months of the year taking rich tourists through the forest to find their personal white whale, and the other three I come back to London to crash with my family. Don't get me wrong, Kigoma's a really lovely city. But London is _home_.

I applied for the job because I love Jane Goodall. I _got_ the job because I'm as patient with humans as I am with wild animals, and that's not usually the case with animal nuts. And yes, it's easy to get caught up in how awful and destructive humans are--again, I spend most of my time in a rainforest. I _know_. But honestly? Chimpanzees would be just as bad, given half a chance. I love them, but they're incredibly capable of cruelty. Other animals aren't so much, except maybe gorillas, but even they pale in comparison to chimpanzees. Anyway, the point is that a good tour guide has to be patient and kind, even when the clients are, frankly, assholes. While I don't think of myself as either of those, I am very capable of pretending to be. So I got the job, spent a year in training and frantically learning Swahili, and led my first tour the year after that. That was in 1998 and I've been with the company for ten years now.

Chimpanzee tourism is a bit odd but not that complicated. I lead a tour group from the moment they arrive in Tanzania until the day they leave. For most of their wildlife visits, I'm the leader, but when we go into Mahale National Park, I hand the group over to a park guide and step back. Only six tourists and a park guide can visit the chimpanzees at once, and while I'm allowed to hang around, I can't get closer than 200 m. At least, that's the regulation. In reality, there aren't enough park guides for the number of people who want to visit, sometimes the groups don't divide evenly, and tourists have the most amazing ability to put themselves and me in danger.

The media likes to pretend that chimpanzees have this stable family structure. That's nonsense. Sure, who's on top doesn't usually change day to day. But the rest of it can and will at the drop of a hat. There's a single male in charge of each family group, called the alpha male. He has a coalition of males who support him--or sometimes stab him in the back. Then there's a large number of hangers-on and wanna-be-alphas who will lurk around the group. They all have a very strict linear hierarchy. Over in the females it's much more fluid, because the females probably came from different family groups and are always trying to one-up each other. As a bonus, young chimps take their social rank from their mum. All of this is very well and good, but you almost _never_ see the whole troop together. Instead you're most often going to run into individual or small groups of males, or a group of females with young. 

That's all a lot of words to get to the reason I'm here. It started in May of 2007, at the beginning of the dry season. There'll only be a handful of chimpanzee groups in tour range, and I was familiar with all three of them that year. Harry led the largest group, which had a dozen males, a dozen females, and almost as many babies. Scarface was the oldest, and the meanest, but had the smallest troop: Only four females, a half dozen males, and two babies. And then there was Scooby. When I returned to Mahale, that troop belonged to another male--actually Scooby's uncle, Roger. But Scooby came up with four other males who supported him, and overthrew Roger the week after my arrival. I didn't have a tour group out at the time, but the researchers said it was a properly dramatic scuffle. Scooby's new group had a total of eight males, twelve females, and eight young. All of this is important, I promise. Usually Harry is the one the tourists see the most of. His troop's territory was closest to the park entry, and we only wanted to walk further if his chimps were far up in the hills.

Scooby overthrew Roger without too many repercussions. Roger was around twenty eight years old, which is ancient for a chimp, and Scooby was in the prime of life at eighteen. He was also very popular with the other males, very good at tit-for-tat favors, and while the actual overthrow was violent, there weren't any attempts at revenge from Roger's supporters. Unfortunately, and something that's pretty normal for chimpanzees, none of the females were in estrus, so Scooby began trying to kill the infants. 

New alphas almost always make a major mistake, and his was going after the alpha female first, a big female called Hannah. Hannah's infant was Brandon, and he would be four in July, which meant Hannah was close to estrus anyway. Again, I wasn't in the park for this, but apparently Scooby went after Brandon when he wandered away from Hannah, and she about took Scooby's head off. He tried a second time, the next week, and I _was_ present for that, with six tourists. They got the fright of their lives when Scooby and two of his supporters came charging out of the bushes at the group of females and children. In the middle of the chaos, Hannah passed Brandon to her closest ally and went after Scooby. She pounded him into the dirt and gave him a permanently ragged ear before his allies could chase her off. Scooby made himself scarce for the next couple weeks, but everyone knew something was building.

In Scooby's absence, one of his allies, Fred, took over. Scooby was gentle with the males but not any good with females at all, and Fred was the exact opposite. The only reason he hadn't gotten his teeth bashed in yet was because he knew to suck up to Scooby, but every other male hated him. He held onto the leadership because Hannah liked him and so did most of the females, and a lot of that was because Fred kept male attention off of them. I don't want to give you a false impression--in other chimp troops, in Harry's troop in particular, things can be very stable and some genuine friendships can form. But this troop had had a rough time of it and a lot of the females weren't much interested in the males. Fred and Hannah reached a neutrality early on where Fred kept the males distracted and Hannah occasionally let Fred mate with her.

And then Scooby came back. I didn't have a tour that week so I got permission to hang out in the observation post and got a good view of it all. The first thing was, he moved different. Scooby always bounded more than the other chimps, but now he walked. He turned up again to meet with a group of males, most of which were his allies, but not Fred. He made all the overtures, even acted submissive a couple times. He groomed far more than he was groomed that day, which means a lot for chimps. Then he disappeared back into the forest.

The next day, more of the same. It was a different group of males, but again, Scooby acted like the lowest ranking one in the group. This unsettled the others and they split up pretty quickly. No one saw what happened that night, but after that, Scooby was always followed by two or three younger males, right on the verge of becoming adults. Things moved rather rapidly for the rest of the week. It seemed that during his time away, Scooby had learned how to behave around the females. He was very polite and submissive to even the youngest, which made them silly, and then he groomed them and brought them food. It was all very sweet--and very odd for Scooby. Harry did things like this, but not Scooby.

Nothing much happened until the end of the month. Scooby was around more and more, in both the single-sex and mixed groups, and Fred was starting to be nervous. He'd only been alpha by default with Scooby's absence, but it didn't seem that he wanted to give it up. The first time he and Scooby were in the same area, Fred postured almost continuously, to the amusement of the research staff. Scooby completely ignored him. It came to a head when Fred tried to run Scooby off over a nesting location, and Scooby stood his ground. He barely postured, certainly didn't threaten Fred in any way, but it was Fred who broke first. He scrambled off, hooting, and the rest of the troop welcomed Scooby back as leader. We all thought that was it.

It wasn't. I had a new tour and missed the next development, but the park guides were happy to fill me in when we got back to Mahale. Not only was Scooby back on top, but he had made allies among the females too, and seemed to have given up on infanticide. It probably helped that Daphne had come into estrus in the meantime. Only, and this is where it stopped being interesting chimpanzee drama and started being something really odd, the next time I had a tour, the whole troop was together. That's rare--like, once or twice a year they'll let people see all of them together. We arrived right at 9 am and had a full hour, and since my tour group only had five tourists in it, the park guide didn't care if I got too close. Scooby, easily identified by his ragged ear, was going around to every chimpanzee in the troop and greeting them. He wasn't pretending to be submissive anymore, but he greeted both males and females, and they seemed happy to see him. 

I thought this was a good sign; maybe the troop was finally starting to heal. Scooby reached Hannah and at first I was worried, but no, he was polite and extended his hand first, letting her be dominant. She postured for a moment, and then accepted his apology and they fell into mutual grooming. I explained this and the backstory to the tourists in a low voice--the last thing I wanted then was to ruin the moment.

As it turned out, Scooby did that all on his own. Brandon had been wandering around and finally returned to his mother. Shockingly fast, Scooby lashed out and grabbed Brandon. Before anyone, even Hannah, could react, Scooby snapped his neck. Hannah screamed and rushed at him, but Scooby just stood his ground. She knocked him over, and I thought she was going to kill him but... He was upright faster than I thought possible, and stared at Hannah. That was it. Only the slightest posturing in the way he stood, and direct eye contact. And after a moment, Hannah crumpled. She was still howling and screaming, but in grief, not rage. In the end, Scooby turned and walked away.

Throughout all that, I had stood frozen. The park guide didn't seem to know what to say either. Violence is common amongst chimps, but it's rare that they'll do it in front of people. A couple of the tourists had screamed and placed hands over their mouths, but no one moved to interfere. That was good, I thought in some strange, disconnected part of my mind: An adult male chimp is stronger than a human, and I had no idea what Scooby would do now.

The park guide finally gathered himself, apologized to the tourists, and led the group to where a couple females from Harry's troop were foraging for the rest of their hour--and a little extra, to make up for the trauma. The group was staying in Kigoma town that night, so I didn't hear about the followup until I was back with another group the next week. Scooby got what he wanted in the end, and Hannah was different after that. Brandon wasn't the only infant Scooby killed either. Of the original eight young, three were still small enough to be nursing, and he killed all three of them. My tour were the only ones lucky enough to see it happen, though, so the researchers were very interested. Apparently Scooby had repeatedly prevented Hannah from recovering Brandon's body before returning himself to consume parts of it. Unfortunately, cannibalism in chimpanzees is pretty common after infanticides, so that's not what set the researchers talking. Instead it's that he broke open Brandon's skull and ate the brain. Just the brain. Most of the researchers were concerned by this development: A major focus of study had been chimp violence with and without human-supplied feeding. This would seem to say it wasn't food abundance causing the fights, but Scooby killing an infant in front of a tour group was a confound. No one knew what to make of it.

Also yes, it was pretty gross. The researchers try to be objective and not anthropomorphise, but that's hard enough in normal circumstances. Chimpanzees are _so human_ , you have no idea. These weren't normal circumstances though, and I heard the researcher on duty had gone to vomit after writing down the observations.

That tour group and the one after that were both calm. I warned them that Scooby was violent and had killed other chimps, just so no one was surprised, but those two weeks he was remarkably polite and benevolent towards the troop. It was almost a Jekyll and Hyde situation, especially when you saw how Hannah avoided him at all costs. On the third week, Scooby's troop was absent from the area. No one could find them. It was fine, because Harry's troop returned to what had previously been their territory, and they were good for watching. No murders, no violence. The biggest drama was when Mabel accidentally picked up Beth's infant. The researchers decided that Scooby, unsettled by the number of humans, had led his troop deeper into the jungle, and that hopefully when they cycled back, they would be calmer. At the same time, Harry had never been fazed by human observation.

And then Scooby returned--not his troop, just him. He began socializing with the fringe males in Harry's troop, almost like he was trying to ingratiate himself with them. That didn't make any sense, though: Males almost never disperse from their birth troops, and when they do, it would never be an alpha male like Scooby. And yet, the evidence was clear: The large rangy male with the ragged ear, who had previously been alpha of another troop, was spending all day with a group of submissive males from this one. Everyone was perplexed by this, and possibly the most confused was Harry. He had always been a popular alpha and had led his troop for ten years now. The researchers expected that he would only fall when he was too old to physically keep up. Despite this, here was Scooby, on the edge of Harry's troop, just too far away for Harry to get involved, but never entirely absent.

Again, I was present with a group of tourists. This time I stood back from the main troop, but that didn't keep me from getting a good look. Scooby had been making allies in Harry's troop and I was suddenly, coldly certain I knew why. That day there were four males who liked Scooby, and three who supported Harry. I mentioned my theory to the camp tracker, and he just shrugged. 

I still don't know if I'm happy to have been right. It's not how chimpanzees _do_ things. Yes, they're capable of war. Yes, they're always after more territory and food. But combining two troops is phenomenally rare. So there I stood, baffled, as Scooby and his allies strutted up and challenged Harry. Harry was just as baffled as we were, it seemed like. At first he didn't respond to the challenge--which takes some doing. If you haven't seen a video, a chimpanzee challenge is a startling thing. Scooby puffed himself up, began hooting, and grabbed bushes and branches to pull and shake. He danced around like that, constantly getting closer to Harry, until finally he was right in Harry's face.

Harry had to respond or he'd be driven out regardless. He charged back, bellowing just as loud as Scooby, and standing fully upright so he looked larger. They circled and before long had moved deeper into the bushes, out of sight. The tourists wanted to follow, but both the park guide and myself said no. Even if Scooby wasn't murderous and unpredictable, you just don't follow a pair of male chimpanzees into thick brush. The best case scenario is you get embarrassingly lost. The worst case scenario is the chimps decide to gang up on you. So we spent the rest of the hour watching the remaining males social groom. Everyone got good photos and walked away happy, but I did ask one of my friends at the research station--Ichiro Sato--to call me when they found out what happened with Scooby and Harry.

The tour spent the night in Kigoma town and the next day were off to Bwindi in Uganda to see gorillas. On the bus there--in a stretch where I had nothing better to do--Ichiro called. I'm afraid I don't remember his exact words, but he said that only Scooby had come out of the forest, and that he was covered in cobwebs. I remember sputtering a bit. There are spiders in Tanzania, certainly, including web-spinners, but the only time I ever care about them is on the occasions when a tour is the first group down a path on any given day and I have to bat them out of my face. Mostly, it's the tourists who want to know which ones are dangerous and if they're common. The answer, thankfully, is no. There's more than enough dangers in Mahale without adding spiders. Ichiro confirmed, though, that Scooby had definitely been covered in cobwebs and that he'd let his allies groom them off. That was odd, and it only got odder when he added that Harry hadn't been seen yet, but Scooby was now acting as alpha of Harry's troop.

I thanked him for calling me and returned to leading my tour. This lot was two families from the States and it was an ongoing series of attempts by the children to escape. So far they hadn't managed it. Two days later, with the tour about to fly home, I got another call from Ichiro. They'd found Harry's body, and it was covered in tarantulas. Now, there _are_ tarantulas in Mahale: They're big, none too friendly, and fond of eating large insects and small mammals. But I'd never, _ever_ heard of them eating a chimpanzee, even one already dead. I remember very clearly what Ichiro said after that.

"Not eating," he said, "just covering."

When my next tour finally reached Mahale I couldn't wait to find out what had happened in the last week. Lots, it turned out. Scooby was ruthlessly combining the two troops, not hesitating to violently thrash anyone who protested. He returned to infanticide for the youngest infants in what had been Harry's troop, and now he had himself a mega-troop of cowed, obedient chimpanzees. Because they were--even after a violent takeover, you don't expect this level of compliance from the females or the adolescent males. But nobody acted out against Scooby, not anymore. Three more adults had disappeared into the forest, and the researchers didn't know if they'd run away or been driven out.

That week was when I started getting complaints from the tourists about spiders in the tents. Or rather, I started getting _more._ One or two spiders a night isn't unusual--Mahale _is_ a national forest, the tents are open to the elements, and spiders have never been shy about coming inside, in Tanzania or in Britain. But when I followed up on the first complaint, the tourist in question reported dozens of spiders on the ceiling of his tent. That was odd. Moreover, it continued. Within a month, every tourist--and when I reached out, every researcher--had seen more spiders than there should be. Far more. But it didn't seem to be connected.

Meanwhile, having unified his troop, Scooby turned on Scarface. Harry's troop had been the geographical middle of the three, so it was a first meeting for both of them. Scooby is about average size for a male chimp, if a little skinny, but Scarface is _huge_. We joke that he's the bodybuilder of chimps. Much like Scooby had become, Scarface ruled through fear. None of the males really liked him, but they didn't like each other enough to topple him. The females in his troop hadn't had any babies in 3 years now, so if anything, I hoped this time there wouldn't be any more dead infants. It happened on the night when my tour group was at Mahale. I slept with the lamp on to encourage the spiders to stay out of sight, but otherwise ignored them. The only time anyone had gotten bit by one, it had been a tourist who was trying to shoo them out of her tent. So we all just pretended the spiders didn't exist. Somewhere around 3 am, I heard chimpanzees yelling. They rarely came near the camp--if they wanted to get to the lake, they went upwind from us whenever possible--but this time it sounded like they were just feet away. I shoved shoes on and stepped outside.

The chimpanzees sounded so close because they _were_. I couldn't identify all of them in the dark, but it wasn't hard to spot Scooby and Scarface--they were closest to the lake and doing the most screeching. Most chimpanzee fights make heavy use of the surrounding bushes, but on the lake shore they were in the open, and the only weapons to hand were large stones. The rest of the troops were around, torn between sticking close to their leader in support, and staying away for protection. Everyone was hooting and screeching loud enough to wake the dead. Scooby and Scarface grappled a couple times and they each landed a good blow--but Scooby managed to strike with the rock, and after that Scarface was struggling. It was absolute chaos with the other chimps running and screaming, but somehow some moronic tourist decided to take a photo. The flash went off like a lightning bolt, and everyone--human and chimp alike--froze. It wasn't that it illuminated the scene, it didn't last long enough for that, but it disrupted it. And into that disruption, into that sudden silence, there broke a scream.

I don't...no one knows how Scooby killed Scarface. After that photo, the chimpanzees scattered and we were able to get back to sleep until sunrise. That's when the camp guide found Scarface's body on the lake shore. He was...he was definitely dead. And covered in spiders.

Things have calmed down at Mahale. After taking over, Scooby has become a much calmer alpha. The researchers say that he was feeling threatened by the close proximity of two other alphas and now that he's the only one in miles, he can afford to be friendly. They're just as scared as I am though. They all saw the spiders too.

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement ends.

Honestly, if my laptop had not crashed when I tried to record this digitally, I would not have bothered with this one. ( _sarcastically_ ) Spiders! In Africa! What a surprise. Still, there are a couple of inexplicable factors that make this statement worth keeping.

First, unusual spider behavior is, ( _sigh_ ) something we should be noting, even if it is otherwise outside our remit. Second, Martin presented me with, er, a persuasive essay on the sapience of chimpanzees and how they should not be underestimated. As generally useless as Martin can be, he does have a point here somewhere--namely, that there is no reason to expect supernatural events to be limited to humans aside from parochial speciesism. Since I dislike engaging in such, I will be somewhat more generous than normal.

Finally, and most importantly, Katherine Dawkins was willing to participate in a follow up interview. I have appended the results.

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

**KATHERINE DAWKINS**

Hello?

**ARCHIVIST**

Hello, Miss Dawkins, this is Jonathan Sims with the Magnus Institute. We had an email exchange last week regarding a follow-up interview--

**KATHERINE**

Oh yes! Yes. About the spiders.

**ARCHIVIST**

... Yes. I just had a few questions if you had the time.

**KATHERINE**

Yes, of course!

**ARCHIVIST**

You gave your statement in December, 2008, and at the time you seemed to attribute a rise in the local spider population to this chimpanzee, 'Scooby'. Do you stand by that?

**KATHERINE**

It was almost the reverse, honestly. When I gave my statement I was still pretty flustered, but later I compared some photos from different tours. There were definitely more spiders in camp, and they started turning up right when Scooby was beginning his rise.

**ARCHIVIST**

...Right. Is 'Scooby' still, er, in power?

**KATHERINE**

No. He was shot by a poacher in 2013.

**ARCHIVIST**

Oh! Oh. I-I'm sorry to hear that.

**KATHERINE**

It happens. Before you ask, yes, the spiders returned to normal after he was killed. I'm actually glad you ended up calling; I wasn't certain whether you took follow up or preferred to make your own investigations.

**ARCHIVIST**

A bit of both, if I'm honest, but we don't have many contacts in Tanzania.

**KATHERINE**

I'm not surprised. What I wanted to say is that Scooby was shot by a poacher, but they only got partway through skinning him for bushmeat. I didn't see the body for myself but Ichiro sent me the photos he took. They were...unusual.

**ARCHIVIST**

( _reluctant_ ) How so?

**KATHERINE**

I don't understand it, honestly. But his body seemed to be full of cobwebs.

[CLICK]

**ARCHIVIST**

End recording.

[CLICK]


	5. The Hunt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a week late because...I got distracted?? oops

[CLICK]

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement of Christopher Devereux, regarding an illegal fox hunt. Original statement given November 21st, 2010. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist. Statement begins.

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

I am writing this down on the condition that you do not tell the police. If you do, my family has more connections than your Institute can possibly have, and you will pay.

So yes. I am a member of a fox hunt. We go at least once a week in the winter, but often twice or more. I have ridden with the hunt since I was 9 and had my first horse more challenging than a schooling pony. Nowadays I have two field hunters, both of whom are Thoroughbred cross Dutch warmblood. They race adequately, and we have taken the prize in a number of minor point-to-point competitions, but their real joy is the fox hunt. There is a level of spontaneity and challenge in a proper hunt that simply doesn't exist in a race. A horse who can keep up with the hounds and clear any fence in a live hunt is worth twice one who can do the same in a drag hunt.

Since I have gotten the impression that most employees here are not, to put it politely, exposed to certain elements of British culture, I shall define my terms. A live hunt is the proper expression of the hunting tradition, in which riders join with horse and hound in order to compete against the wily, wild fox. A drag hunt is one where the fox has been replaced with a scent, which a person drags behind them in a poor attempt to imitate a fox's unpredictable behaviour. Certain members of society believe that fox hunts are cruel, and for that reason the hunt, which has five hundred years of history behind it, has recently been banned. This is absurd. A fox hunter is no more cruel than any other predator, and certainly less than farmers who put out leg hold traps and poison. For centuries, the fox population in Britain has been controlled by fox hunters, and I refuse to feel ashamed for that.

Yesterday started like any other hunt: I turned out at half ten in my black hunting coat with three buttons on the back. My initial plan was to ride Pholoe but she had pulled up lame the week before, so I brought Arethusa. Having arrived in plenty of time, I said good-morning to Richard Morris, the Field Master. We were meeting in front of the Blackhorse in Nettleham with the intent to ride out to the north, where Andrew Kenneth, the Huntsman, had located a good covert with three or four foxes. To comply with legalities, he also had laid the trail, but had deliberately done so away from where he believed the foxes to be denning. 

The Barton Hunt is of a decent size, with perhaps thirty regular riders and twenty couples of hounds. Despite this, Richard Morris is a well-organized man and the meet had ended by half eleven. We rode out, and I, due to my position as a long-time subscriber, rode in the first flight next to Mark Lee, the whipper-in. When the fox was drawn, he would have his duties to perform, but Lee is a good sort, even if he is a professional, and we spoke fondly of past hunts. 

At the first covert, the hounds scattered and put noses to the earth. This one was not particularly covered in vegetation, so I had an excellent view of the pack searching, tails boldly erect and quivering with excitement. To be frank, so was I, and Arethusa was practically dancing under me. When the first hound caught the scent and his head went up, Kenneth and Lee went forward to make sure they had found a fox and not the drag scent. I hung back next to Richard; we had gone to Eton together and as such he gave me a nod, which was considerably more interaction than most members of the hunt get.

All of a sudden the cry went up from Lee, who was stationed on the road-side, to ensure the fox did not bolt that way. Charlie had tried, but he saw Lee and returned to his covert. Lee put the call up anyway, a loud "holloa!" and a point back into the brush. The hounds closed in, beginning to bay—the most musical noise ever made by beast, if I may be so bold. Before long, the fox came out of the covert on the other side, heading straight into the fields and the wide open, and the chase was on.

If you have not ridden to chase before, you cannot know how it feels. Up ahead the fox nips and tucks as he attempts to stay ahead of the hounds. The Barton Hunt pack is of a very good breeding and stay quite close together, even in full flight, and at the same time, they give tongue. The Huntsman and the whipper-in are next, riding side-by-side on what are, coincidentally, matched bay warmbloods. The fox dives under a gate and the pack splits, half to soar over and half to scramble under. The Huntsman barely checks his mount by a pace before they clear the gate handily. The Field Master, in the lead, takes the fence cleanly and I, pride of place in second, follow after. Arethusa is a neat, clean jumper and we land without trouble on the other side. And so it should have gone for the remainder of the day, for a good hunt with a wily fox can last for six or eight hours and necessitate a change of mount in the middle.

The first field and the one after that, the fox remained in sight. Then it went into the woods and gave the hounds the slip for the first time. The hunt came to a standstill whilst the hounds searched the covert. We had two guests riding with us, and their horses were fractious, but Arethusa put her head down to graze and I took a sip from my flask. Before long, the hounds gave tongue and were on the trail once more.

This time, however, it wound through the forest. We had to ride single file, as foxes know no trail, and the hounds led us through briar and over bramble. At length we emerged into a field once more only to find the pack strung out in front of us, with Kenneth a good two hundred yards away. His job was to keep the hounds together and on the fox, and he was doing an admirable job of it. It fell to Richard to keep the field together, which was normally no difficulty. However now a number of riders had fallen behind in the woods, and he had to gather them up and be sure no one trespassed upon another's property. Graciously, he gave me the right to follow the Huntsman without waiting for the rest of the field, and I took advantage. 

I spurred Arethusa across the meadow and into the next patch of forest. Kenneth's scarlet coat was just visible and we dove down the scarce trail. Arethusa was surefooted in any condition, and she did not hesitate to trot through the thick forest. For a minute, perhaps two, I was able to see Kenneth. Then he sped up suddenly and I was a touch too slow to urge Arethusa forward, and I lost sight of him. 

This is not unusual in a hunt—of an occasion, a fox slips away, the hounds follow, as does the Huntsman, and the rest of the field is left to locate them at their own pace. Thus I was not concerned when we did not quickly catch up. I could still hear the hounds baying and follow the swaying plants disrupted by Kenneth, and knew eventually this patch of forest would end.

Only it did not. At first, this was not a matter for concern. The passage of a horse and rider, not to mention twenty couple of hounds, leaves enough of a mark in the forest to enable even the least experienced tracker to follow. Arethusa was eager enough and I could regularly orient myself on the hounds giving voice as they found the trail once again. Over time, however, I grew concerned about where we were. I know the area around Lincoln quite well, and the closest large forest is the Lincoln Wolds. Those were about fifteen miles east, however, and I knew we had not been out that long. Out of curiosity, I reined in Arethusa, and waited for Richard to catch me up with the rest of the field.

I waited, by my watch, five minutes. In that time the sound of the hunt grew fainter, and yet I could hear nothing coming from behind me. Finally, I decided that they must have taken a short-cut to where the pack had brought a fox to ground, and that my best bet would be to continue as near to due east as I could, and follow the sounds of the dogs. This was, to start with, none too difficult. The baying of hounds can travel for miles, and Arethusa knew as well as I that we should be rather closer to them than we currently were. The woods were open and not obstructed by brambles, so we covered the ground easily enough.

Then the sound of the hunt faded away, and for the first time, I grew a little concerned. It did not happen all at once, but over several minutes, and then the forest was quiet. All I could hear was Arethusa breathing and the occasional bird. I kept her going forward regardless, as a whole hunt could not simply vanish. That was nonsensical. For another ten minutes we made our way through the forest, sticking to the most open paths and with ears pricked for any sign of the hunt.

When I finally heard them, I felt foolishly relieved. We had only been alone for a little over twenty minutes, after all; hardly an extensive length of time. Yet it felt like more, and the whole situation was just odd enough that I was considering pretending it had not happened. The noise of the hounds baying and a horn winding above them were therefore a gift, and I turned Arethusa to face the new direction.

My first sign that something had gone terribly wrong was that the sounds were coming from behind us. I am no great navigator, but would like to think I did not get so muddled up in the woods as all that! Still, foolishly, I dismissed it. It was easier to accept that I had erred than to try and understand what had really happened.

It did not take very long before Arethusa balked and refused to move forward. This was unusual, as she was normally a bold and confident hunter, but I made the attempt to drive her on regardless. She again refused, tossing her head, and eventually threw such a fit that I had to let her be or risk being thrown. At the same time, the hounds were getting closer. As they approached, Arethusa grew more and more restless, until finally, at the same moment as it sounded like the hounds were about to come into view, she spun and bolted. 

I am an above average rider, and stayed with her through her following twists and turns, but even my skill found itself stretched when she began to jump fallen logs. Arethusa is a good jumper, but both she and I are used to a trifle more preparation before handling three and four foot leaps. As she bolted, I turned my head once, to see what had spooked her so.

I could not see them, only hear them. The hounds were loud enough to be almost on top of us, yet I could not see a fox, nor did I know why Arethusa, who normally is so reliable around the hounds, would have bolted from them. Despite this, she was galloping flat out, at a pace she only reached when urged, and nothing I could do would persuade her to slow. When I sat deep in my seat and gathered in the reins, she tossed her head and pulled through my cues. It was not the first time I had found myself on a bolting horse, and it surely will not be the last, but there was something about this instance that concerned me. I held on, though, even as she gave less and less heed to my own needs, once going so far as to pass under a branch barely two feet above her back. I pressed myself close and count myself lucky that it only brushed my helmet.

After a while, Arethusa was starting to flag and tire. She was in good shape, but it was the equivalent of a panicked sprint over rough terrain, and impossible to continue for long. I took the opportunity to rein her in and turn her. She obeyed; in retrospect, I think this was only because she was more tired than she was afraid. Despite her maddened gallop, the hounds were still close on the trail, and I expected to see the hunt sallying forth at any moment.

I did, but it was not the hunt I had envisioned.

The first things to burst onto the trail were the hounds, though they were like no hound I had ever seen. They stood at the shoulder as tall as a pony, and were jet black without a spot of white. They were in form like foxhounds, if considerably larger, but I had never seen a foxhound in that unrelieved shade of black. At the sight of them, Arethusa shied so violently that I was thrown to one side, and upon her recovering and bolting once more, I fell. I landed on my side in a pile of leaves, and was appalled to realise, shortly thereafter, that the hounds seemed to be pursuing me.

Like any good pack, they did not charge me, but circled around, baying constantly. It was an eerie sound: At once higher and lower than the normal voice, of a pitch to rumble the earth and with overtones that rang unpleasantly in my ears. Shamefully, I tried to scramble away, but one of the pack was behind me and I felt its jaws too fast and too close to my head snapping in warning. I remained where I was put, for the first time terrified.

From the depths of the woods—and I had never before seen trees quite this old or this densely packed—came a series of riders. To a one, they wore black hunt jackets and cream breeches, and to a one, their tack was black with silver accents—a colour scheme considered too modern for a proper fox hunt. None wore the proper pinks or any shade other than a black so deep it seemed to drink in light. Their top hats put their faces in such shadow I could not tell you if they were dark or pale, man or woman, old or young. They simply were. Their horses too were identical, ethereally lean beings composed entirely of long planes that assembled into a stark black shimmer. Both riders and mounts looked at me with loathing, though how I knew this I could not now tell you.

I stood, thinking to say something—a greeting, perhaps, or a query as to why another hunt was riding today when the Barton Hunt traditionally rode on Saturday mornings—but the words would not come from my mouth. Instead, I was filled with an unspeakable fear, the sort which left me shivering and my palms clammy, as I looked up at that line of riders.

Without truly understanding why, I ran. I was frightened, yes, but it was an unusual, unfounded fear and it seemed cowardice to give in to such. Yet, without conscious direction, I found myself running—sprinting, if I am to be honest—away from those riders and their unnerving silence.

Perhaps inevitably, they followed. The hounds bayed and came after me, close on my heels, and for the first time, I thought I understood how the fox feels. I have explained the hunt to people in the past who want to know why it is not animal cruelty. Because, I always said, what we do to the fox is no more than what the fox does to the mouse, and just as natural. The English fox has no natural predators other than fox hunters, and without us, they would grow out of control and so far overrun their food supply that thousands would then starve to death. Regular hunts, I argued, are far less cruel than starvation. 

That was a pretty lie. I would rather almost anything than go through that again.

Try something. Run as fast as you can until you have to stop and bend double, sucking wind in against your own diaphragm when it is still seizing from effort. Then start running again. Do that again and again until you feel nauseous, until your legs are so shaky you can barely even stand. Then run again, and again, and again, and the hounds are always, always, always at your heels, and their voices are no longer song but the drumbeat sending you forward, the only thing pounding louder than the blood in your ears. Time has no meaning then, nor space any reality. They both stretch and snap under your feet; you have been running for hours and for miles, and still the hounds are snarling from behind you.

For quite a long time I did not see the riders. I tried not to see the hounds either. Riding boots are not meant for running in, and I twisted an ankle fairly early on. I can only think that they did not want the chase to end so quickly, because I have no other explanation for why the hounds did not pull me down right then. It hurt, but that paled in comparison to the stitch in my side that never went away. I had heard that adrenaline makes you faster: Unfortunately if that has any truth to it, it applies just as surely to whatever pursues you. Certainly my own attempts at fitness before that moment had not honed me to the same level of athleticism as the hounds.

When it ended, it was almost anticlimactic. I had just staggered up a hill and caught sight of a ruined stone wall; no doubt the remains of some ancient castle. I sprinted—well, more almost fell—down the hill, managing to get a few feet in front of the lead hound, and threw myself at the wall. I hit it hard enough to wind me, not that it took much at that point, but did manage to get my fingers into a crack and then, with strength I was sure I did not have, haul myself up. The hounds were prepared to follow, though, so I ran along the wall, almost falling twice, to the closest overhanging branch and climbed onto that as well. Once up there, I was higher than the hounds could jump and they circled the base of the tree, baying the song of frustration. I did not dare stop though, as I did not know what weapons the riders would have. I scrambled up the tree, as high as I could dare get, and clung close to the trunk. There I hoped they would think me gone, unable to be seen from the ground, and the dogs confused.

I was partially correct. The hunt rode up, just as composed as they had been from the start, something I found ghastly unfair, as my sweat had soaked through all of my clothing and I was trembling quite badly. They...I was going to say, they looked at me, but that is not right. Their heads faced me, but I am not convinced there were any eyes on those faces. They knew I was there though. For a long while, I have no idea how long, they stood at the base of the tree I was in, their horses just as motionless as the riders, and waited. The wait of the prey, I know now, can far outlast that of the predator, and eventually they rode off, taking the hounds with them.

I stayed in that tree until nightfall, just to be safe, and then climbed down. I have no memory of making it back to town, but I do remember the Hunt welcoming my return and saying that Arethusa had been caught and would spend the night at a local farmer's. Everything after that is a bit muddled, I am afraid. Richard Morris recommended I come tell you what happened. I was already coming to London today to meet a friend who works at Whitehall and thought I would drop in here. I suppose it's good luck that you are open Sundays.

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement ends.

Supplemental. Christopher Devereux left the Institute on the afternoon of November 21st and walked towards Whitehall, which would normally take about twenty minutes. He never arrived to meet his friend, a Mr Owen Reynolds, for lunch, and he was shortly thereafter reported missing. As his last known location was the Institute, we were investigated, and a note on the file says, (ahem) "Met still annoying and useless. Definite Hunt victim." As if to confirm that, Christopher Devereux's body was discovered in Hyde Park three days later. The cause of death was ruled to be dog attack.

End recording.

[CLICK]


	6. The Spiral

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! I have gone back to work and so my attention span for fics has gone right out the window. Special thanks to kunacottontail for motivating me to post.

[CLICK]

[INT. THE ARCHIVIST'S OFFICE, BUT JOINED BY A FAMILIAR STATIC]

**ARCHIVIST**

Uh-hi. Hello. What are you doing here? ( _faint static from the Archivist)_

**HELEN**

I thought I would pop in and see how you were getting on. And give a statement.

**ARCHIVIST**

You-I—Okay. Statement of Helen R- _(noticeable increase in Distortion-style static)..._ Statement of Helen, regarding...?

**HELEN**

Elephants.

**ARCHIVIST**

... Sure. Statement of Helen, regarding elephants. Statement taken direct from subject, first September, 2018. Statement begins.

**HELEN (STATEMENT)**

It's not all humans, you know. I mean, sure, maybe it is, here at 'the Magnus Institute', where everyone needs to be able to read and write and interact with humans in order to feed the Eye, but everywhere else? No. There's plenty of other things on this Earth and all of them know fear. There are far, far more encounters with the Hunt than you will _ever_ know about, just because the victim couldn't talk. So yes, this is about elephants, and you can wipe that disbelieving look right off your face. 

I like a bit of variety in my life, and distances certainly aren't a problem, so this was... Oh, dates. Perhaps six months ago? Or two years, something like that. I also don't _have_ to use doors, although they're certainly easiest—you never can quite be sure what is on the other side, after all. It's so simple to replace that something with a different something that's me! And then I have them. 

But whenever it was, I was in Namibia. The desert there is _like_ doors, in that it stretches on and you only discover what's on the other side of a hill when you have already crested it. I'm certainly fond of confusing directions and erasing the trail. It's so very easy to do there, when the sun rises early and sets late and is always, _always_ directly overhead, and the only difference between this hill and the next one is your own vain hope that you are somehow closer to your goal.

Humans don't go there much, and those that do are _very_ well prepared. It can be fun to catch them that way, twisting their paranoia into the Lost, but it's rare I succeed before they reach their destination. Instead, when I go to the desert, I play with the others. There are so many, _many_ beings out there which can get tangled up and turned around, Archivist, and humans are just the loudest. My favourites are the elephants. They're so _stubborn_ about it, and it's so much _fun_ to move their paths around so they spend days walking in circles, looking for the next water hole.

There was this one herd who I had spent years...building a relationship with, shall we say. Elephant herds are very familial, very touchy-feely. You'd hate them. Their given names won't translate well, but then, names are so complicated. There's Grandmother and Eldest and Hairy and Curious, and then many grandkids. How many is a...tricky question right now. Grandmother is in charge, of course, because elephants are so very tedious about their rituals. I think that's why It Is Not What It Is likes them so much. Elephants are just as good at humans at deceiving themselves into thinking their actions have _meaning_ and _purpose_ , when we're all just floating around this chaotic little world bumping into each other. And because they think there's a meaning, they put oh so much weight on their actions, and that's how they end up paying so much attention to Grandmother. I mean I suppose it helps that she knows the most, but really. _Knowledge_. Ugh.

Grandmother was oh, quite old. Old enough to be a grandmother, I suppose. Dates aren't _really_ my area of expertise. The point is, Grandmother knew all the best paths to get her family safely between water holes. Elephants aren't camels you know—Oh I forgot! You can't respond in the middle of a statement. Too bad. ( _brightly_ ) Did you know that camels can go weeks between drinks? Elephants can't. They can go days, yes, but not much longer. The babies can't go long at all, poor dears. So it's really very important to know where the water holes are, and which are most likely to be full at what point, and so on. Tedious nonsense. 

I had seen this herd around but hadn't messed with them before. It's important to ration your meals, as there are so many potential fears and so few...actualized ones. This time, though, I decided it was time. I set my sights on one of the grandchildren, a young male who the others referred to as Long Tail. Long Tail was perhaps a year or so too young to leave the herd, and his mother and aunts hovered around him to make sure he didn't wander off early. Hoping, I think, to keep him with them long enough to learn more about the desert, give him a better chance of survival, so on. 

Mostly what it meant is he was very determined to explore on his own, and was stymied most often _not_ by his older relatives but by his younger. His siblings and cousins very much thought him the greatest entertainment they had ever met, and followed him incessantly.

It was all so perfect for me. At first, it was a matter of convincing him to truly slip off from the rest of the herd. Helen was, to be honest, an inconvenience here, so I stepped out of my door and over a hill looking rather more like one of those very impressive bull elephants Long Tail so wanted to meet. His strategy was to hang back in the herd and let his mother and aunts gather his siblings and cousins up; then, unnoticed, he could gradually fall behind and then catch up in his own time. He was getting quite practiced at it too, so it wasn't long before he had stepped over a dune, out of sight of his family, and into _my_ power.

Long Tail was so very brave, and very excited to meet an older bull. I only shoved him around a little, for my own amusement, and let him explore my corridors—or what they look like when I'm not befuddling humans. They're decidedly stranger. Humans have the _oddest_ ability to make the familiar even scarier than the strange, did you know that? Only humans would be afraid of a corridor just like any in a shabby hotel. Elephants require oddity after oddity, and I provided them for Long Tail.

When a day or two had passed, I let him go again. I did intend to eat him eventually, of course, but it sweetened the meal to extend the game. By returning him to his family a few times, I created an ongoing fear over which time would be the last time. It made his interactions with his hovering mother all the more delightful.

This lasted, oh, several months, and I had just decided that this next time would be the last one for Long Tail—or perhaps the one after, it depended on how tasty his fear was—when things went...differently.

He fell behind, like normal. I provided him a different dune to walk down, like normal, and showed him the true wonders of the universe, like normal. Very pat, very rote. In fact, this sameness was why I was tired of the game and eager to find a new toy. I shifted the dunes in the right way to lure him deeper into me, into the place where the corridors and the dunes overlap and become _me_ , and he followed along eagerly. Except for the first time, someone had followed him.

It was Grandma, because of course she would decide to get involved. She was oh, quite old, and was distinctive even among matriarchs for having one intact tusk and one broken off close to her face. She was following Long Tail too closely, and when I tried to shift the sands to keep her out, she _ignored_ me! I was able to open a different route for her, and so separate the two of them. With one part of me I monitored Long Tail and made sure he was only going deeper into myself, and with the other I confronted Grandma.

She was not pleased, I can tell you that. It's hard to forget an elephant charging you, full of intent to murder. There wasn't much she could do to me, though, so I just waited for her to finish and then told her to go home and forget about her grandson. For which she tried again to thrash me, with no more success than the first time. I admit, I mocked her then. Don't look at me like that! You know what I am, Jonathan Sims, and you know what I feed on. And so did Grandma, and she should have behaved herself appropriately.

At any rate, I tried to open something useful for her, and turned most of my focus to Long Tail.

I had him very well turned around and about to lose his temper, when I felt something...odd. Understand that the Distortion, that _I_ only occupy a body in that it benefits me, and you cannot make a distinction between me, Helen, and me, the corridors, and me, the Distortion. I am all of those, and I am more. The Spiral turns through me as you can only dream of the Beholding looking through you. I can't describe how it felt when she found the doors. The most I can say is it was like cramps, but even then...Like that had been turned sideways to how you would normally feel it. I consolidated on Grandma and found her pulling the hinge pins out of me—out of _my doors_.

My doors don't even _have_ hinge pins!

Grandma had worked her way through two doors already, and just pulled the hinge pin out of a third when I appeared in front of her. She looked at me with one great, brown eye—have you considered an elephant for the Beholding?—and dropped the pin deliberately. She made it quite clear without needing to resort to things such as human words that she wanted her grandson back, and she would not take no for an answer.

Fortunately for me, I don't need to argue with mortals who think they can defy me. I threw her out into the desert again, and returned my attention to Long Tail. Only, just as I was focusing in on him, there was a twisting within me. I'm sure you don't know this, Archivist, but it should not be possible for me to twist in such a painful way. There is twisting and turning as the Spiral does it, and then there was this wrenching, which was not of the Spiral at all, but if anything, of the Destruction.

I turned on it, that horrible tearing, like losing a hand, and found Grandma there with her tusk in my walls. I admit, I lost my temper and threw her out. Only she wouldn't go. These corridors are _me_ , they are _a part,_ and to say that I cannot throw her out is like saying you cannot close your eyes. It is an impossibility and an abomination, it is _untrue._ And yet, she remained. She remained, her feet so column-firm on my carpet, and turned her head to drag her tusk, with a shuddering _awful_ noise, through my wall. It hurt me, I who am not alive to be hurt, and I _screamed_ so.

She then put her trunk through my wall, into my guts-which-are-not, and grabbed something there, so deep that even I do not know what it was. She threatened me in a way impossible for...well, almost anything. I was to return her grandson or she would make me suffer. I am not one for fear, and I do not respond to threats. I could shift my walls such that what she had hold of was no longer the vulnerable, aching part of me, but instead another wall in another corridor, and that the me-that-speaks was no more fleshy than any of the rest of me. And then I waited to see what she would do next.

I no longer cared for Long Tail. His fear was a petty thing, my normal diet. Grandma's fear, of losing her grandson and that I was, in reality, stronger than her, and could lose her too, was novel and exciting. I let her sit with that fear, radiate it, like a spinning top sheds energy, and drank it in. I did this for perhaps too long, because it took me far too long to realize that a fear so unusual came with it something else unusual.

It is devotion that saves mortals from the Isolation, as you know. It is a sheer, single-minded focus that can save them from _me_ , although not very often and even rarer when I have my full attention on them. Grandma had this to spare, I think because she was the matriarch, the elephant whose entire role was guiding the herd from resource to resource, and never letting one stray or be left behind. And so she found on her own what has only before been found by humans with maps: My heart.

You have a heart too, just as well protected. I think that all of us do, who exist in these ways. It has been almost two hundred years since anyone threatened the Beholding's heart. For me, it has been barely ten, and I had just gotten over the shock. My attention was once again focused by the feel of a horrible, solid, unchanging tusk in a part of me I thought safe and secure, outside of the sort of terrain that mortals can easily handle. Perhaps I had succumbed to the same sort of bias I accuse the Institute of, however, as an elephant found her way through without harm.

She was no more pleased then than she had been before, and made the same demand: She and her grandson would walk free without retaliation. I wheedled and tempted, showed her the dancing growing changing patterns, and she—

She grabbed _me_ with her trunk and throttled _me_ , and then returned to pulling out _hinge pins that don't exist_ . Listen, even for me there are some things that are _impossible_ and those doors weren't made with hinge pins! I don't even know _how_ to make a hinge pin!

Yes, I let them go. ( _sulky_ ) What else was I supposed to do? I wanted to take her, she would make _such_ a good Distortion, but she wouldn't...allow it. There has to be a choice, you see, and she would always choose no, no matter the consequence. And otherwise I couldn't— _(static rises sharply_ ) Alright _fine_ , I couldn't kill them. I could not. Kill. Them. She would not let me. I don't know how, and _believe me_ , that hasn't happened before.

Statement ends.

**ARCHIVIST**

_(startled_ ) Statement...ends.

Wait, what? You wanted to _vent_??

**HELEN**

_(much more composed now she's not being compelled into giving information she doesn't want to_ ) Yes, of course. Don't you have someone you can vent to?

**ARCHIVIST**

That's—that's not the point! You can't just _waltz_ in here and take up my time like this!

**HELEN**

Whyever not? It is what you're here for, after all.

**ARCHIVIST**

( _biting_ ) I am _here_ to take statements I can _make use of_ . ( _static rises_ ) Unless you are rather more self-sacrificing than I'd thought.

**HELEN**

A factor I was not unaware of. The price was worth it.

**ARCHIVIST**

( _muffled, as if said into a hand)_ Just go.

**HELEN**

Don't you want to know what I got from it?

**ARCHIVIST**

No-

**HELEN**

One must take every opportunity one finds to puncture the Beholding's ego.

[ARCHIVIST GROANS LOUDLY]

[HELEN STARTS LAUGHING, BUT IT RAPIDLY FADES. SOUND OF A CLOSING DOOR.]

[CLICK]


	7. The Stranger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh it's been a hot minute hasn't it. whoops.

[CLICK]

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement of Katherine Knowles, regarding her possessed dog. Original statement given 20th August, 2000. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Statement begins.

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

I  _ know _ you're going to laugh at me. I know your reputation and I know... I just, I know, okay. I have talked to every profession imaginable and they have all gone away laughing, and at least you don't  _ charge _ for the privilege of telling me I'm losing it. But I'm not. My dog is possessed by the devil, and it's trying to kill me.

This wasn't supposed to happen. I got a puppy and I did everything right. He was in obedience at sixteen weeks, right on schedule, and he was a star student. He's a Labrador, from some chap who uses them for hunting and had an extra. The breeder is a friend of a friend, so I knew he wasn't from some horrible situation. I met the parents, both golden, and saw where the puppies were born. Listen to me, I did it all right. He was so good in the classes, and even at home, I don't think he went in the house more than a handful of times. I don't know what went wrong. I just... I don't know.

It started when Max--the dog, my boys named the dog Max--when he had just turned a year. We threw a party, right? Of course we did. He was an adult now, and also any excuse for a party when you have two sons under ten years. My boys are Richard and Peter, and they were four and nine. I wanted them to have a dog to grow up with, that's why I got Max. Anyway, the party. I invited over some of Peter's friends from school, and Richard's friends from the neighborhood, who came with their mums, of course, though Peter's friends were old enough to be dropped off and left alone. All told there were about ten children and five parents. One of Peter's friends, a nasty little boy called Stefanus, with some Greek surname I can't pronounce, brought party poppers. I don't know why. After the singing and cake and presents--all dog toys--I sent them out into the garden to use the poppers. Of course Max went out with them! But when they started pulling the poppers he just--that was when it happened.

The first popper went off, and Max yelped. I think he was just surprised? He certainly didn't want to be in the garden after that, but it was his party and if I tried to bring him inside, Peter would have protested. He just sat by the back door and occasionally whined. He was such a good boy, then, and he let the boys all hug and pet him on the way out. He even liked it, he was still smiling when they left.

He was normal, really. Even after the party, he was normal, because the popper didn't scare him that much. I know what a scared dog looks like! Their tail tucks and his never did, he just kept wagging even when the popper banged. It was harder to get him to go out and wee--he did more on walks and less in the garden, but not so much that I was concerned. He just didn't like the garden so much. Two weeks later, we were out for a walk when a car backfired.

It surprised me too, and I jumped, but not nearly so much as Max did. He scrambled back and was whining. Our route took us on past it through, so I shortened the lead and kept walking. He dug in and refused. Like I'd been taught to in those obedience classes, I popped the lead. At this point he was about 5 or 6 feet from me, but I saw his eyes change. I can't describe it. That was the moment he was possessed. It was like my loving, happy dog had been replaced by a devil in the exact same shape. He growled, lower than I would have thought possible, and didn't move.

I didn't know what to do. The trainer had never needed to do more than one pop. If it was the leash pop, and I hate myself for it, don't worry, I didn't want to make things worse. At the same time, in order to go back, I would have to pass by Max. I'd never been afraid of him in his life, but now I was. I hate myself for that too. So I just stood there on the pavement until Max got up, shook himself, and turned for home.

I followed. And I didn't call anyone about it. It was just a one time thing. It was just, he'd gotten scared by the car and that was all. It wouldn't happen again.

You know the truth, and deep down, so did I. Very very quickly, Max devolved into some wild beast, not at all the gentle Labrador I had raised from a puppy. He had been potty trained almost from day one, but now he started peeing inside. When I tried to put him out in the garden, at least so I could clean up, he refused. If you haven't owned a dog, you won't understand what that can look like. He wasn't  _ violent _ , but I simply couldn't get enough of a hold on him to pull him out the door, and he was too fast and too flexible for me to get him out any other way. That was annoying, but ultimately I just took him for more walks. I work from home, so that wasn't too hard.

Until, about two months after the party, Max stopped liking walks. I don't know what happened, I've tried, trainers keep asking, and I  _ don't _ . There wasn't  _ anything _ . He was never hard to take for walks, until he started hiding when I would pick up the lead. Except he wouldn't go in the garden, so he  _ had _ to go for a walk, because I wasn't about to have dog shit and piss in my home, so I would go and find him. At first this was fine. Once the lead was on, he was fine, and I could take him outside.

Until it wasn't fine, and that was the first time he bit me.

He had hid underneath the kitchen table, which was normal. I reached under with the lead clasp, which was normal. He growled, which was--and I realize this sounds bad, but it's true-- _ normal _ , he was growling at me almost every day now but I didn't know what to do about it. I couldn't see under the table well, the way I was standing, so I heard a clacking noise--which was also normal, he had started doing this snapping thing with his jaws--and then sudden,  _ sharp _ pain. That was just the start of it, the initial nerve response. After that came the dull throbbing pain of muscle injury, and I knew I needed to go to hospital.

That makes it sound a lot more organized than it really was. I think in reality he bit me, and I probably screamed and definitely panicked. I don't know who called 999, but in the end, I was able to walk to A and E. I had to get antibiotics and a tetanus booster, but the prognosis was good. Apparently I had gotten lucky. I didn't feel lucky. I felt betrayed. I felt like this puppy, who slept in my son's  _ bed _ , had turned into a horrible vicious monster.

Some things changed immediately after that. For one, Max now slept outside the bedrooms. But others took longer. The trainer I had taken obedience from had closed down or moved, so I had to call around to find someone who came with any recommendations at all. He was a big man, ex-police, and had fifteen years of experience with aggressive dogs. He assured me on the phone that this was a fixable problem, that it wasn't my fault, and that he would return Max to the way he had been before.

I admit I cried. It's so hard to be a single mother as it is, and now with my boys both at school, and Max having all these problems, I felt like I couldn't have anyone over because what if he bit them? So to have someone say that outright, that this was treatable, was a huge relief.

The trainer came over the next week. In the meantime, he told me to not worry about taking Max for walks. If he got desperate, he would go out in the garden but otherwise to buy puppy pads and to wait for him. He was a nice man, from Liverpool originally, and he reassured me immediately upon arrival that Max was treatable.

He asked a lot of questions and took notes, and then explained that we would be living with some new rules. Max was no longer allowed on the sofa or in the bed. He had to sit before going in or out, before getting fed, and before we could pet him. The trainer called this 'nothing in life is free'. He explained that Max was biting because he thought he was in charge of the house--the alpha. So what I had to do was teach him that I was the alpha and he was nothing. Everything he wanted, he would get only when he behaved correctly. Additionally, since his behavior was so bad already, the trainer gave me a training collar. It looked like a prong, which I'd heard bad things about, but he said that was propaganda out of trainers who weren't skilled enough to use them correctly. The way it worked was it sat right at the top of Max's neck, behind the ears, and when I popped the leash, it pinched him like his mother would have. I was to do that any time he wasn't listening or was acting out. Finally, we bought a muzzle and began putting it on him any time he left the house.

It worked, for a bit. With regular corrections, I was able to take Max out for walks and although he had to be on the lead the whole time, he resumed doing his business in the garden. He wasn't as playful, though, but he stopped biting me, and I felt him safe to have around the boys.

I told you he was possessed. I had thought so from the incident with the car, but didn't tell anyone. When you have those beliefs, well...There's a reason the Magnus Institute doesn't advertise much, doesn't it? It doesn't pay to be overt about them. I keep it to myself, and those who agree with me, we find each other. I had hoped that what the trainer advised would make Max inhospitable to the demon, drive it out somehow. Or that at least it would let me control the demon and keep it from hurting my family. I was tragically wrong.

The new state of affairs lasted two months, during which my older son, Peter, turned eleven. When I hosted his party, Max was confined to a crate. That worked quite well whenever strangers were over, and the boys knew better than to let him out. After the party I...

When I came in here, I promised to be completely honest, and you told me this would be confidential. I'll hold you to that, and here's a secret: I don't like Peter. I didn't at the time either. He's a braggart and a bit of a swot; thinks he's so much better in school than he really is. But anything he knows about he has to be the absolute expert on, even though he's not even a teen yet. There you go. That's my shame as a mother.

But he was still  _ my son _ . Until after that party, when he wasn't. The demon replaced him. Peter was short, a little overweight--would he listen? no--and had my black hair and his father's awful, near-sighted eyes. Now, well...Now he's tall,  _ very _ skinny--he still won't listen about that either, at least  _ that _ hasn't changed--and is blond. Like his father, I suppose, but that doesn't  _ happen _ . He acts like my son, he talks like my son, but he is not. My son. He  _ isn't _ .

The dog did that, because Max's behaviour got worse at the same time. That very night, when I tried to take him out to do his business, he bit me again. It was even more shocking than the first time because now I knew, thanks to the trainer, what his warning signals were. I corrected him for them, of course, because dogs shouldn't be aggressive towards humans. This time, I opened the door, stepped out, called him after me, and when he didn't move I popped the leash. He came up the line, completely silent, and sank his teeth into my arm. I screamed, and tried to grab his jaws with the other hand. Max let go before I could reach him, though, and dropped down. He stared up at me, and then turned and urinated on the wall. I know I should have corrected him for that but I didn't. I couldn't. Blood was streaming down my arm and it was all I could do to get inside and call 999.

This time they sent an ambulance, and I had to put up with extensive questioning. I don't remember what I said when they asked what had caused it. I think I may have lied. I know that the Dangerous Dogs Act meant Max could be seized and killed and I still hoped--foolish, I know. But I hoped anyway. Maybe, if I just tried harder, I could drive the demon out of him, and out of Peter.

When the doctors finished stitching me up, they sent me home. Richard was obviously shaken up by what had happened, but Peter...Peter was not. He just nodded when I explained that Max had to be muzzled all the time now, and said he was going to stay with a friend next weekend. He didn't even ask permission! I was too rattled to say otherwise, though. 

I called the trainer again the next morning. He promised to be out the next day. He...didn't come. I don't know why. Peter ran off just before noon, and after calling him four times, I eventually phoned police. They found him, but not until close to 5 pm, and so I didn't realize until evening that the trainer hadn't turned up. Due to everything, Max spent the whole day in his crate. Eventually he had to urinate in there, which caused an awful stink. I didn't want to let him out through until I had a professional who could help.

I spent the very next morning on the phone with a dozen trainers, all of whom were booked or simply busy that day. Finally I found someone who, at double his normal rate, was willing to come out that afternoon. I would pay it. I would do anything.

You don't understand what it means to have a seven stone demon in your house. A dog that size can kill you easily. He can kill my  _ sons _ . And there would be no warning or motivation, just a flash of jaws and those horrible, pressing teeth. They're not sharp, not really, it's the  _ pressure _ that tears your skin. Then they go in just fine. And all the while, the demon would look at you with those cold, angry eyes, like you had personally caused it. I didn't, though. Whatever my failings with Max, they weren't enough to cause  _ this _ . This horrible, paralyzing fear.

The trainer arrived and instantly I felt better. Just like the last, he was calm and in control. He evaluated Max briskly, got him outside to do his business, and had him following around without complaint in moments. He told me to buy a device called a control collar. It's electronic and comes with a remote. Whenever Max acted out, I was to hit the button on the remote. He said that the prong collar was a good start but not effective enough and too difficult to use when Max wasn't right by me. It was the first time in weeks I saw Max wag, and that was when I realized how rare it had become. What was possessing my happy dog? What had happened to him?

The trainer also said that this wouldn't be a one time fix--he spent a lot of time talking about hacks who thought they could do one session and cure everything. He would be back the next week and the one after that, and if things were still progressing, he wanted me to join an obedience class.

I agreed to this, but not without reservation. You see, even though I was afraid to bring it up to the trainer, I believed quite devoutly that Max was literally possessed by a demon. I'd had thoughts of calling the local priest, but Father Lewis is a very practical man and would not understand properly. He would seek for help for me first, and while I agree I need it, that would not ultimately solve my problem. So I rather thought that this would be another stop-gap. something that would stem the tide of Max's evil for a period, during which I hoped the boys would finish the school year. The heat of summer would calm Max, and with the boys around, perhaps they could exercise him a little more.

Yet it was still four weeks to the end of the year, and in that time Max declined yet again. Peter was home from school early with some fraudulent explanation, but I was too busy with making sure Max's crate was closed to pay him any mind. The crate, it turned out, was not properly closed and when Max hit it, he burst out into the room. He was furious--the demon inside him was raging mad, having been held back by the training. I saw in his eyes how he wanted to kill me, and the remote for his collar was too far away for me to hit it.

Peter did...something. He had been odd since his party, I mentioned, but this was odder, because Max recoiled back. I wasn't looking at Peter, of course, so I don't know what he did, or even that it was him, except that he has been  _ so odd _ . I don't have any other explanation. Max froze for just a second, and I was able to slam the door shut and latch it. I came up to my feet, and turned to face Peter.

And that's when Peter said something that I think I will remember to my dying day. He looked at me with a smile, but not like a child at all, and said, "Don't you think you should look at my old photos?"

I didn't know what to say. Occasionally I would sit the boys down and show them photos of their father, when they were smaller, although Peter still remembered him quite well. This was, however, the first time Peter had ever volunteered to look at the photos--and what a way to phrase it! I was convinced it had something to do with the demon. Perhaps the horror in Max was trying to divert attention, or remind me of better times, and that was why it was now speaking through Peter in that way.

I went to the photo albums regardless. They were...I had hoped they would confirm my memories, that Peter had, in the last year, dramatically shifted in appearance and behaviour. They did not. Instead, all of the newer photos, all the way back to when he was five, when Dan passed, were of this stranger that had replaced my son. Before then, with the old camera, yes, there was Peter as I remember him. But I can't...I don't know what's happening. I think it's the demon.

Max was unbearable. I had to have him muzzled constantly, with one of the wire ones so he could still eat, and even then he would sometimes rush at me and slam his muzzle into my leg. I have bruises up and down both legs; it's a good thing I'm not one for the beach or I would invite awkward questions. The last incident was last night, and it's why I came to see you. We have an appointment with the vet tomorrow, but I wanted to...say something. To someone.

Peter is, by this point, the only one who will take Max's muzzle off. He says it's important for him to have some time without it, something about wear on his fur. So he took it off and took him into the garden--I don't know how, I will admit I was preparing dinner by that point--to play fetch. After a while they came back in, and Peter didn't put Max's muzzle back on. Again, I didn't notice as the roast needed slightly more attention than I had to give. Peter came to complain about my cooking, which I would blame on the demon except I have it on good authority that adolescents complain about everything their parents do in the normal course of things regardless, and Max followed.

He saw me, and I stood upright like the trainers had both recommended. I reached for the remote, and at the same time, he lunged at me. He wasn't going for my legs, which would have been easier, but my arms, and he hit. His jaws went around my elbow and latched down. I cannot describe the pain. My arm was caught in the worst sort of vise, with horrible nails in, and I screamed. He didn't let go. Peter had this blank, mild look on his face, and said nothing.

Eventually I got the remote in my other hand, and hit the button until Max let go with a yelp. I don't know how but I was able to wrestle his muzzle on. My arm was not broken, but I went back to A&E. This time a dozen stitches, and they recommended I euthanize him before he hurt someone outside my family and broke the law. I agreed. When I went home, crying, Peter wasn't mad. I don't know why he wasn't mad. He's been mad about everything else, but this time he just patted my arm. And then he went to visit a friend and didn't come home for supper. I haven't seen him yet today.

The appointment is tomorrow. I came here because, well, the vet will say something about aggression being difficult to treat, but it's  _ not aggression.  _ That's not a normal dog anymore. He's possessed. And I hope that killing the dog will return my son to me. Something is  _ wrong _ with Peter and it has to be the demon, it must be, so killing the dog will fix it, right? Otherwise my next step would be the parish priest but I don't think that will work, somehow.

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement ends.

Basira followed up on this for me. Two months after this statement was given, Katherine Knowles drove the family car into a stone wall in a murder-suicide. The police called to the scene gave conflicting reports. The officer who interviewed a witness reported that both sons were in the car with her. The officer who prepared the bodies said there was only one.

I think we can conclusively say this was another appearance of the NotThem. Peter's radical change in appearance and personality, the way that no one noticed it except one person, who was, unfortunately, not too fond of him in the first place, followed by a tragic death and missing body. That, at least, is easy to explain.

What is less explicable is the behavior of the dog. There's nothing in here that would indicate the NotThem replaced the dog as well. It's just possible that the dog was responding to the NotThem aggressively, but the attacks began before Peter was killed.

Another mystery for the pile, I suppose.

End recording.

[CLICK]

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [ all the same organs of feeling DVD commentary](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24345454) by [JulisCaesar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulisCaesar/pseuds/JulisCaesar)




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